CREATIVE NONFICTION

By Rachael Hanel

You’ll need strength to do this.

*

You see the bodies around you, beau­ti­ful in their power, the way legs float effort­less­ly up into the air and achieve sir­sasana, head­stand, for many breaths. You want that power and beauty, too.

*

Week after week, while others do sir­sasana, you prac­tice ardha pincha mayurasana, dolphin pose. On your knees, you form a tri­an­gle base with your fore­arms, fingers inter­laced. Cradle the crown of your head into your hands. Lift up your hips, legs straight, heels on the mat, as you do in adho mukha svanasana, down­ward-facing dog. Then walk your toes toward your arms. Feel the shift as your weight moves from your feet to your shoul­ders. You lift one leg up, then the other. You feel too heavy to ever float.

*

You live in a small town, teach at the uni­ver­si­ty, vol­un­teer. A new friend enters your orbit. She’s friend­ly and funny. Every­one likes her, if Face­book is an accu­rate gauge.

*

Sir­sasana is not what it seems. You’re not stand­ing on your head. The effort is born out of your core and shoul­ders. Regular prac­ti­tion­ers of sir­sasana will push down with their shoul­ders and arms and lift their heads off the mat, at first just enough to slip a piece of paper under­neath, but with prac­tice there will be room for a book.

*

You spend more time with her and see beyond her façade. She’s not friend­ly, she’s not funny. In fact, she’s cruel and crit­i­cal. Accord­ing to her, you do every­thing wrong. You teach wrong (my dad never has any absent stu­dents, even when he teaches at 8 a.m.), you wear the wrong clothes (I have that same shirt, I wear it only for working out), you get tattoos (I hate tattoos), you go to yoga class (I hate yoga), you train for a marathon wrong (you wear a watch? I never wear a watch) you stay in and watch movies with your husband (how boring) when you could be in down­town Min­neapo­lis par­ty­ing in the club scene.

*

You do ardha pincha mayurasana for years and years. You hop one foot off the mat, then the other, just to get a feel, for the small­est frac­tion of time, of weightlessness.

*

You see the bodies around you, beau­ti­ful in their power, the way the legs float effort­less­ly up into the air and achieve sir­asana for many breaths. If you were her, you’d get up from your mat and walk over to them. One by one you’d push them over. They’d fall onto each other like dominoes.

*

The saddest part is that you’ve always avoided tox­i­c­i­ty, easily dis­missed drama, have never been hes­i­tant to stand up for your­self and set bound­aries. But this one: She has spread her ten­ta­cles through all of your friends, so to cut her off they would fall away, too. You grow silent. It’s easier to pretend you’re friends. Even though by doing this, you’re as inau­then­tic as she is.

*

Upside down in ardha pincha mayurasana, every­thing looks dif­fer­ent. The oil paint­ing of a koi fish on the studio wall—it’s still a koi, but now it’s swim­ming upstream. Smiles look like frowns.

*

You brace your­self for the next insult, the next crit­i­cal judg­ment. Her barrage of texts that ques­tion every­thing you do. You start to fear the chime of an incom­ing message. You turn off noti­fi­ca­tions. But you know the mes­sages are there, waiting.

*

You gain ten pounds in two months. Always lean, always active, you go to the doctor and ask for tests. It must be a thyroid issue, you think. What other expla­na­tion accounts for gaining a pound a week? But then you think: The heavier you become, the more you can withstand.

*

Your head is heavy, ten pounds or so, a bowling ball on top of your neck. Because of its weight, where your head goes, your body will follow. The only way to achieve balance is to bring your mind into the present moment. The second it slips, your body will slip, too.

*

One day, at home, on your mat in your loft, which looks over the living room and your husband watch­ing TV and your dog lying in front of the couch, you do ardha pincha mayurasana and you feel every­thing click in your core and back and shoul­ders and this time, both of your legs come off the mat. Like an unseen force pulls them up. You didn’t plan to do sir­sasana today. It just happened.

*

Yoga teach­ers say the best thing you can do when learn­ing inver­sions is to fall. Just fall over once on the mat, and then you’ll know how it feels. You do, and it’s sur­pris­ing­ly not scary. The thought was worse than the reality.

*

You do more sir­sasana. The thing you thought you’d never be able to do, you do. You stop craft­ing mes­sages you think she wants to hear. Finally, you stop craft­ing mes­sages at all. She falls away.

*

Our bodies know how to correct imbal­ances. We wobble, we teeter, and all those muscles from shoul­ders to back to belly move and con­tract and expand to bring us back to center.

*

You lose the ten pounds. You achieve sir­sasana each time you try. You hold it for three breaths, then five, then ten. Soon you know you’ll be up to the fifteen breaths the prac­tice requires. You bring your legs straight down in sir­sasana B, half-pike, a clear 90-degree angle formed by your back and legs, hold there for a couple of breaths, bring legs back up straight, then down to the mat. You see the world dif­fer­ent­ly, for longer and longer periods of time.

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 19. Support local book­sellers and inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers by order­ing a print copy of the mag­a­zine.

Photo by Con­scious Design.