The Wrung-Out Feeling

March fourteenth. I keep trying to describe what the yoga class does and coming up short, which is annoying because I write things for a living, loosely, in the sense that I write this blog, which is a thing that exists and that I am committed to calling a living in the loosest possible sense. But I go on Wednesdays now. That's a sentence I can say. I have gone enough Wednesdays in a row that it has become a sentence rather than a plan.

Today I stood in the hallway outside the studio afterward and couldn't immediately remember what I was supposed to do next. Not in a bad way. In the way where your body has been somewhere completely specific for an hour and then the rest of your life has to come back into focus slowly, like adjusting to light. I put my boots back on. I zipped my jacket. These were decisions that took longer than they should have.

shoes back on, body still somewhere else entirely

I walked home. I let myself in. And I stood just inside the door for maybe thirty seconds with my eyes closed, which I would normally never do, because I am not someone who does that, I am someone who walks in and immediately goes to check if there's anything left in the fridge that counts as dinner. But I just stood there. The apartment was quiet. Gerald was presumably doing whatever Gerald does on a Wednesday afternoon, which is nothing, visibly, because he is a pothos plant, but he was there. The collapsed bowl was on the windowsill in the kitchen and the light was doing something nice to it. I thought about the letterpress flyer still sitting in my camera roll from two weeks ago and then thought about it some more and then stopped thinking about anything for a minute, which is the whole point.

I think what the class gives me is not calm, exactly. I wrote that once and it was true then and it's still true now. It's more like, a temporary agreement. My body and my brain deciding, okay, we're doing this one thing right now. We're in this room with these people on these mats and we're doing this one thing. And for the duration of that hour, neither of them is trying to escape. That's what I'm going back for. That's what I've been going back for, apparently, all these Wednesdays. I just figured out how to say it.