The Part Where the Habit Blinked

March sixteenth. The sub's name is something I still don't know. I heard it at the beginning of class and then it was gone, which is fair, because I spend most of the first five minutes of Wednesday yoga doing the same three poses I always do while thinking about something else entirely. That is, apparently, the point I have arrived at with a Wednesday habit I have been keeping for years: I am no longer there. I am somewhere nearby, moving my arms, and the actual me is thinking about Carol or Gerald or what I forgot to buy at the store.

The sub moved differently. Not better, not worse, differently enough that I couldn't maintain the internal monologue. She held the warrior sequence a beat longer than I expected and I thought about my back foot and then I thought about nothing else for the rest of the hour. I came out of it in the lobby with a paper cup of coffee I don't remember buying, sitting in one of those padded chairs with my elbows on my knees, apparently staring at the middle distance with such commitment that Simone, who had appeared at some point, found it photograph-worthy before she found it concerning.

the comment she made about the sub that finally snapped me back

What Simone actually said was something like: 'you're going to burn a hole in that cup.' Which is a Simone thing to say. And it did in fact snap me back, the way a small dry comment always does, which is probably why I keep going to these Tuesday sessions with her even when I could go alone. I laughed and the lobby reassembled itself and I was back in March 2021, sitting in a community center in the particular exhausted ease that comes after you've actually been somewhere for an hour rather than hovering just above it.

I wrote a little about this the other night, the substitute, the sequence, the way attention is not the same as presence, but I couldn't land the thing I was actually trying to say, which is: I didn't know I'd stopped showing up to yoga until someone showed up differently and made me have to. That's the part worth noting. Not the sub's name. Not the sequence. The fact that the interruption was the proof that something had settled so deeply into habit that it had started happening without me. I don't know if that's a problem. I think for now it's just a fact, the kind that only becomes visible when something briefly goes sideways. Which, if I'm honest, is basically the whole function of a Wednesday.