The Uses of Sorrow
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver
The yoga teacher is saying we carry old emotion in our hips. She's saying this as tears slide out of my eyes. Down my nose. Dropping like acid rain onto my mat. I’d never considered what was living in my hips, but where else do the words behind the gag have to go? My legs are pretzeled below me, humming a war song. I am confused, embarrassed. Grateful for the dark room. I came prepared to sweat. Had plenty of electrolyte water, and a grippy new yoga towel. I knew it was going to be hot— but I hadn’t prepared for a pyre. I was not ready when pigeon pose loosened the ribbon on an armory of buried feelings. I was not ready when, in down dog, our sad existence started funneling out of me like wet sand, threatening to seep over onto her mat. Someone really should have told me the 100° room and my notoriously tight hamstrings were going to be the least of my worries. I barely held back the sob in my rib cage. It caused actual pain in my throat. She didn’t notice me crying, her mat so close to mine I could smell her. A thought ghosted from its' crypt in my hips before I could check it, before I could stop it: ‘I wish she could see me.’ I almost said it out loud. What did she see when she looked at me? Was I the constant reminder of her self-deception? I think she lovehated me. Lovehated the way I kept our secret. Lovehated the way I made myself a broken bird in her palm. Lovehated the way I loved her grandparents, her parents, her kids. Lovehated how I made her home clean and beautiful and safe all those years I never lived in it. I never asked you to, was the closest she came to saying thank you. My ability to carve dark pockets into my strong, sensitive hips dovetailed perfectly here, don’t you think? I don’t blame her for any of it. I did this— I did her— to myself. Every ache in my body came from trying to hold the pose of being someone I was not; trying to please one who could not know me because they would not know themselves. My neck screamed with the whiplash of turning away from myself, over and over again. I stayed and stayed. I rarely cried back then, but I cried my way through that yoga class. I cried as a 20-year-old yogi schooled me in the ancient ritual of stretching a body open— taught me the art of releasing the secrets hidden in its corrugated, leathered limbs. The muscles stretch. The bones gap. Blood floods in and gorges on the shame living in the abdominals. Unworthiness is twisted from the pelvis like salt water taffy. God. I was so fucking small. Wound so tight. Barely room inside me to breathe.
The end of a yoga practice is sivasana. Corpse pose. I laid there in the dark that night of my first yoga class, leaking rusty water from my body onto an orange yoga mat. The smell of her beside me, settling like crop dust into my pores. Still intoxicating. In some firm muscle, some steely rib bone, I knew I was fucked. I knew it almost everywhere— except the soft part of my brain that held acceptance. The lights came on. We all namaste-ed and rolled up our mats. I followed her home, made us dinner. I barely touched my food, but inside I spoon fed the insatiable hunger of the hopeless hope I had for us. I cinched up the sinew around my hips as I washed our dinner plates. Fortified my marrow as I kissed her goodnight. I could save us if I just kept trying. I knew determined insignificance. I knew how to do it. I was masterful at it. I could matter less, just give me the chance. The wretched prayers of the unknowable. Back then, I could only survive tiny moments of truth. I didn’t know yet I was being shown what was unhealed inside me. I thought I was trying to love her. Turns out, I was being shown how to love me. Turns out, it was a gift that would take me years to understand and sometimes still forget. Turns out, the real practice is loosening the armory in the chest. And trusting somehow, you’ll survive the flood.
*Lived 2004-2017; written 2020; edited 2023.
Beautiful. "Lovehated the way I made myself a broken bird in her palm."
Thank you for such beautifully written images of the unbearable pain you exposed especially when you first wrote it, and now edited for us to read. Such courage!