You Pulled A Muscle

speed hurts / traffic eats your life

i.

You broke your own golden rule: slowly, slowly. You really weren’t striving, you swear — but speed detaches. It had only been a couple months since surgery, and you were trying to do the absolute least, but your bones remember things your muscles can’t do now. You’d been gingerly practicing sun salutations on your knees for weeks when you forgot where you were, threw yourself back into downward dog too fast, and felt a searing pain.

Why did you try to get back into it so soon? A psychologist once wrote that you have ‘anxiety high even for clinical levels’, and you’ve tried everything, but all that really helps is alcohol and yoga. You can’t use alcohol like that anymore, and you can’t just do any kind of yoga, of course not. It has to be an intense and very specific sequence of poses, the same every time, most days a week for years, until your muscles progressively loosen and your limbs begin to wrap around your torso in ways you thought only circus performers could do.¹

It was the only exercise you’d ever done that felt like Xanax; desperately, you got obsessed with it. You needed to do the sequence almost every day, or you would lose your mind. The sequence helped you work jobs you hated, deal with the shock of frequent change that is early adulthood. It was there wherever you were, in all the strangest places, and it was always the same, the rhythm of that sequence.²

But after a few years, you fumbled off a single step in the dark, and fell with all your weight onto one ankle. The sequence is impossible if you can’t put weight on both feet, so you had to stop entirely, and when you tried to go back, it was never the same. You drifted; you fell apart; you were put back together. Meanwhile, your body changed, and it felt like there was no space to twist or bend anymore; you’d try to go upside down, and be choked by your own unwelcome chest.