Saint Louis, Missouri
2006

My feet were pressed firmly into the mat, wrists aligned with the shoulders and hands planted alongside the ears. I could see her ankles beside my head and they appeared unusually low and flaccid, resembling the ears of a sleeping hushpuppy. My arch was textbook and she was notably impressed and slightly baffled as to why I’d joined her introductory yoga class. These suspicions were quickly veiled with a look of indifference that suggested she’d seen my kind before and was not about to permit an easy transferal of power. Unbeknownst to the fact that her husband and I had spent the majority of ‘05 in Bed Pose, she continued her demonstration of Extended Side Triangle, contorting her body into the shape of an unfortunate casserole.

She wasn’t as I’d expected her. It was apparent she wasn’t a dancer, but there was something else — something muted and vaguely tragic about her. She reminded me of a kindergarten teacher from the Midwest whose friends exchanged scented candles during Christmas time. Her hair was mousey and unkempt in a way that was purposeful, as to elicit a sort of bookishness about her. I imagined her Myspace photo as an off-centered limb or angled representation of feet. She was bashful and overly eager, and still, I recognized his immediate attraction. The reasons he could dismiss her futile attempts at understanding obscure music and underground comics. She grasped the workings of every Frankfurt Modernist: Marcuse, Horkheimer, identified their art under the margins of capitalism. She’d read Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” a thousand times, highlighting key points and paraphrasing them over their budget stove-top dinners. There were no issues of Jama tucked behind her art books, no calculators, graphs, or beeping pagers, no scientific reigns to confine their budding theories. She was etched with the supreme freedom to submerge herself in a way that was so layered and concentrated, that coming back to the surface, answering the phone, closing a door, stepping off the subway, came slowly.

I scanned the room for the nearest exit. I felt hostile and vain and lyrical and American and powerfully disproved. There were middle aged women sprawled across the floor in compromising positions, their Lycra tops climbing up their waist and their heaving husbands beside them, wondering how it had come to this. I felt sorry for everyone involved. As I made my way to the back of the room, I noticed her hemp-laded satchel propped against a folding chair. I could see the bridge of Miranda July’s Nobody Belongs Here More Than You, peering over the hem, begging to be rescued from an Ann Rice novel. It was my book — there was a tear on page 37 from when he’d arrived home early and surprised me in the den, as well as two shades of nail polish on the back cover. I was about to bag the book and make a quiet escape when I noticed the blue Volvo pulling into the parking lot. The blue Volvo with make-shift cup holders and passenger seat ink stains.

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