12.

INFIDELITY

I woke up with the exhilarating urge to cheat on my Fitbit fitness tracker.

What if I sneak outside and start walking without wearing it on my wrist? I could walk anywhere and it won’t know. I could stop after an eighth of a mile, sit at an outdoor café with a 450-calorie cold-pressed mango smoothie, and watch YouTube videos for twenty minutes.

It won’t note my slowed heart rate. It won’t obsessively calculate calories or track pounds gained or lost based on the “profile weight” I entered, which may or may not have resembled what my profile weighed the day I started. It won’t note anything because it won’t know.

I stride out the front door. Scroll to the Fitbit app on my phone and laugh right into its little dashboard. “HAH! I am cheating on you today! I’m going for a walk without your tracking one thing about me. I left my wristband on the kitchen counter! I’m free!”

My eyes flash, wide and triumphant.

The wide, triumphant flash causes my left bifocal contact lens to dislodge. I blink to keep it in place, which makes both eyes get teary, which makes both lenses swivel. By the time all the blinking and swiveling is done, the bifocally part of the lenses is positioned better than before, and when I squint back at the screen I realize I’ve just delivered the whole life-affirming speech to my frozen yogurt loyalty app icon.

No matter. I’m liberated. The first steps are giddy. I’m walking on my own two feet and no one’s keeping track.

Block number two: I look around. Is anyone watching how I’m walking with no one watching me walk?

Block three: I do a tentative little hand wave. Look at me! Nothing on my wrist! I’m walking without anyone watching me! Someone look at me!

By block four, it’s all I can do not to scream out to complete strangers. LOOK! I’M CHEATING ON MY FITBIT WHILE MY FITBIT APP’S RIGHT HERE IN MY FANNY PACK! IT’S BOUNCING ALONG WITH EVERY STEP BUT IT DOESN’T KNOW IT BECAUSE I LEFT THE WRISTBAND AT HOME! IT WILL NEVER EVEN SUSPECT! LOOK AT ME!!

Is it possible to experience anything in the twenty-first century without an audience? This is what I wonder in block number five.

I stop to Google the question, hoping that if passersby aren’t amazed that I’m walking without tracking, they’ll at least give me credit for pausing for a runner’s cramp. Before I can click Google, I see a new message from Fitbit: “One step at a time! Get moving!”

I sit on the curb.

“Runner’s cramp!” I call toward six women in Tour de France spandex who streak past on skinny little bikes pretending they’re not impressed.

“I have been moving!” I hiss to the iPhone screen. “I already walked five blocks!”

Another message from Fitbit bings in. “Motivate your day!”

“I don’t need motivating!” I hiss back. “I’ve been walking without telling you!”

“Take a quick 250! Let’s go!”

Now I am screaming out loud. “I WANT CREDIT FOR CHEATING ON YOU! I WANT CREDIT FOR CHEATING ON YOU!”

I glance up. A woman pushing a stroller careens sharply to steer her baby to the non-me side of the street, her Chihuahua racing beside her too terrified to bark.

“DON’T BE AFRAID!” I shake my phone in the air toward the frightened family. “I HAVE A CRAMP! I HAVE A CHEATING-ON-MY-TRACKER CRAMP!!”

I look down the street. Even the cars have quit coming this direction. Waze must have sent out an alert that there’s a lunatic sitting on the curb.

I’m all alone. At the end of block five. Zero witnesses. Zero accountability.

One hundred percent unobserved, unsettling freedom.

I try and fail to embrace my emancipation. With nobody watching, it seems so empty to go on. What’s the point if no one will know?

I consider downloading a different app that tracks directly from the phone without a wristband and recording my walk from here . . . but I wouldn’t get credit for the five blocks I’ve already gone. I consider going home, putting on my Fitbit wristband, and starting all over, but even to me, who’s spent the last nine minutes of my workout sitting on a curb, starting over would feel like quitting.

I think about the years ahead, with all the people and places changing and the likelihood that I’ll need to take many, many steps with zero possibility that anyone will care to record them. I think of the millions of things in life I’ve been afraid to try alone so far. I think of all the people who forge ahead on all kinds of dreams without a tracker, an app, or a support system.

I feel a familiar wave of total inspiration and complete disgust.

I turn my phone all the way off. Stand up. Boldly head toward block six. All by myself, but really by myself this time. I walk with a new commitment to own my own minutes, to do something just because I said I would. In this century of astounding, triumphant personal accomplishment, I am succeeding at this: putting one foot in front of the other without telling anyone else. Going down one little road by myself. Boldly, bravely, walking into the rest of my life.

I feel a brand-new happy rush of endorphins. I feel my heart wake up. No fitness tracker on earth could measure how far I’ve already come today.

And now, rounding the corner by myself to block seven, I pause to give myself a nice little round of applause.