Two days after he raped me, I went to yoga.
In the middle of the day, 14th street, day off my corporate job.
I expected to be forced
out
by outbursts of laughter because I am too cynical – too smart, really,
for layman philosophy and also because
my body wasn’t mine.
I couldn’t recognize it. Looking in the full body mirror in my roommate’s bedroom I matched my motions to the motions of the person against me, unconvinced.
The forty-eight hours prior I had spent walking through. Were the lines somewhat blurred? Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe instead of freezing in my catatonic terror I should have
Maybe when the next morning he said I hope you didn’t have nightmares that was
The ends never tied together.
At the yoga studio, I lay on my back and stretched those newly unfamiliar joints and tendons.
The yogi wasn’t much of a talker. All she said was,
“One thing they taught us in training was,
You gotta let that shit go”
And that was really fucking profound, because
until that moment, in those 48 hours I had accumulated a heavy stack of excuses for him
that he couldn’t bother to even make for himself. I was pretending the pieces would somehow
fit.
I was planning on carrying around that stack of excuses
until it broke me, vertebra by vertebra.
Let that shit go.
I knew why the ends didn’t tie together.
It was because the lines are perfectly clear, because
I had no part in what he did and what he did was not my fault and what he did was wrong.
I can choose what to do with the heavy stack, turn it over to the police or write a dissertation or burn it,
or turn it into something of a poem.
But it has to go.
And it didn’t happen the same second, or
the same month really
but moment by moment, my cheeks and lips, my arms and calves,
my thighs
my pelvic bone
started to feel mine again, attached
to my brain, attached
to my soul.
