There is a rare intimacy about the gym in the condo. You see strangers in a space so familiar it is called home.

In various states of dress, all these people who might never lounge this way at a paid-for gym appear, paunches relaxed over swim trunks, texting from the hot tub.

I recognize the teenage girl who walks straight to the bike, earbuds in, five intense minutes and then done. I see this man who fights the drooping elastic in his skin by lifting free weights every day.

I'm the barefoot one, hair barely back as it slithers from last night's braid, on the free-motion running machine. I'm a regular; they know me. We on the eighth floor run from behind our glass-walled balcony and watch the pool scene below.