FLAWED NARRATIVE OF RECOVERY by Josie Milliken
1.
During a trip back home to Washington state one weekend in late August, 2016, I visit my freshman college roommate. We haven’t seen each other in two years, and we are sitting across from each other at The Octopus Bar, a dusty Seattle dive with a nautical theme.
It is late afternoon, and the temperature is in the 90s, unusually hot for the Northwest, and I remove the scarf I have been wearing since flying out from Tucson, Arizona earlier in the day. My freshman college roommate looks at me and says, my God, you are bones and skin. I shift on the hard stool, look away, try changing the subject, this crazy heat, how did your kids like summer camp, what books are you reading?
But she doesn’t let go, and she won’t, I know her, and here on this hot outdoor patio, amidst murals of octopus tentacles, dusty ancient fishing nets, antique glass floats, and rusty anchors, there is nowhere to hide. So I reveal my secret: my everyday routine, my knowing I should stop, my body not stopping, surviving on less and less.
You can’t keep doing this, she says. You will die. I nod, say yes, yes, I know, don’t worry, I will stop, take better care. And I mean it. In this moment, it is what I want and need.
The next morning, I pay forty dollars to use a hotel’s fitness center, run six miles on the treadmill, swim a mile in the pool, and do sun salutations in a back corner behind a water cooler. The next day, I run for an hour along city streets, fly back to Tucson, swim at the University of Arizona pool on my way home from the airport, do an hour of power yoga in my dark home.
2.
It began with running: running as a child with my father through drizzly clouds on gravelly roads past cow pastures and bright red farmhouses and ditches tangled with blackberry bushes in Washington, running throughout junior high and high school in cross-country and track. My first two years of college, I stopped, then began again, remembered how good it felt, so good there was no reason not to run every other day, then every day, then why not twice a day, and further.
Running: rhythm of soles pounding pavement, air hurtling through lungs, body cutting wind, sprinting past trees and curving roads and fog and pain and love and frost and sun and hurt and rain. As an adult, for two decades, I ran at least five miles a day, more when training for marathons, ran through blizzards and pollution-hazard days and injuries and illness and 110‑degree heat, through heartbreak devastation euphoria love tragedy loss, circles on circle-layered circles, rutted paths in skin and muscle and memory and bone. Life came and went. Running stayed. There is a kind of beauty, there, that every runner knows.
In 2006, I moved to Tucson, Arizona, where I got married and took a full-time job teaching writing at a community college. From there came adding. First, swimming, needing swimming every day, seven years. Still running, working. Power yoga, needing power yoga, every day, five years. Still running and swimming and working. Every day, adding more: teaching more classes, becoming a yoga instructor, pulling weeds, scrubbing front porch, biking to work, biking to the YMCA and to the charter school to teach yoga, biking to Ace Hardware for air filters, going back for extension cords, back again for light bulbs, raking smooth clean lines in the sand driveway and yard, still running swimming yoga work, each day a blur of move move move, don’t stop move more do more go. Incredible what you can accomplish if you never stop.
With adding came subtracting: subtracting eating before 2:00 p.m., then 4:00 p.m., then 6:00 p.m. Subtracting fats, eating with other people, subtracting other people. Weight, gradually subtracting from body. Subtracting breasts, menstruation. Subtracting curves, softness. Subtracting writing, sleeping, emotion. Then, one life subtracting mine, divorce.
3.
I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, wonder why my arms are bones and sharp angles and blue lines of vein, why my ribs jut through my skin like tent poles straining to support nylon, why my breasts, once soft and full, now hang low and flat and wrinkled like sad deflated balloons.
When I leave the house, I wear scarves and long sleeves to hide collarbone and ribs, cross arms to conceal ropy veins, shiver in air-conditioned offices and classrooms, shift in pain in hard plastic chairs during meetings. At home, I cocoon in electric blankets and silence, ignore cries of aching spine, pulled hamstrings, burning heels, aural migraines frazzling vision and thought. I teach and practice yoga wherever I can, exist in a bleached-out ambient blur.
When I travel for work, I stay in hotels with lap pools, even if they are miles out of the way, because I need to swim. Before early morning flights, I get up at 2 a.m. and run in the lights of late-night cafes and clubs. I weave through crowds pouring out of bars and hold my breath through clouds of cigarette smoke and cologne, euphoric that I got up in time to run.
One summer, I discover how good it feels to massage coconut oil into burning chlorine-dry skin until I look at the nutrition label and then spend hours searching online to see if fat and calories absorb into the body. I am not the only one with this question: a woman from Toledo, Ohio says she gained ten pounds within a week of using coconut oil to moisturize her skin. A woman from Arcadia, California says she uses it for stretchmarks and hasn’t noticed weight gain. I throw the jar of oil away.
July 2016: On my way home from the airport after teaching yoga for a week in Costa Rica, I stop at the U of A so I can swim. Before leaving the locker room, I step on the scale, see the lowest reading I’ve seen since eighth grade. I figure the scale is off, weigh myself again back home. Same. But: I always weigh less after trips. I have been away from my normal routine. Within a day, I’ll be normal, I tell myself.
I admire women with soft curves, how they move so confidently and comfortably in their bodies, and I yearn for my own soft curves and confidence and comfort, often so much I feel the back of my throat ache and my eyes water, and I fight the urge to cry.
During a meeting on student retention, I gaze down the row at peoples’ arms, hands, everyone clutching agendas, phones, or resting hands at sides, in laps. I gaze at my own arms and hands, notice ropes of veins visible around wrists, lumps and ridges, vine-wrapped limbs, exposed like ivy. They look like dying.
This can’t go on, I think, rolling out of bed in pain, limping through morning runs, slathering my feet in Icy Hot, shivering in frigid bone-cold ache the first ten minutes of every swim. But it goes on.
I don’t understand why: why I look and feel and act this way, why I can’t do anything to change, why even if I could, I don’t think I would.
4.
The day after I return from Washington, my body repeats: Run, swim, yoga. The sun bleaches out thoughts, muscles muddle through memorized motions, body feels faded and dusty, old shoes left in Arizona heat. After the swim, I put my suit and swim cap into my locker, shut the door, and close the padlock. I do not know how I know, but I know: This will be the last of this.
My freshman college roommate calls and tells me she has called my sister, my two good friends in Tucson, my father. She has told them I am sick, she says, has demanded intervention, told them something must be done.
Shouldn’t feel embarrassed. Shouldn’t feel humiliated. Shouldn’t feel shame, guilt, discomfort. Shouldn’t feel weak. Shouldn’t feel like crawling deep into hard desert earth and calcifying into tiny tight nothingness with the carbon exhales of lost life.
Should just feel. Should be open, feel feeling flowing through. Should transform into a neutral feeling vessel, observing the entrance and exit of feelings. Should consider feelings of feelings. Should piece feelings together into stories, move feelings like blocks into meaningful, logical shapes. Should bring these shapes out into the world, say, see, this is me, this is why I am how I am, this is what I can do to not be.
Funny how untying one knot can cause everything else to loosen. Funny how long we wait at lights, blowing exhaust, waiting for change. Funny how this body toggles, craving at one moment to be soft, nourished, healthy; needing the next to burn off the excess, life, the world; to survive with just bone.
5.
On my second day back from Washington, I get up at sunrise, take a walk around the neighborhood, then cross over toward the University, walk by coffee shops and hair salons and clothing stores as the world glows pink, then honey, tangerine.
When I first began teaching yoga four years ago, I realized how many people in the world exist with deep, dark pain. These are the students who arrive to class twenty minutes early, place their mats at the edges, keep their eyes closed or in muted, neutral gazes, and often fall into child’s poses or restorative positions in the middle of a class.
One night during those early days of teaching, my husband at the time revealed he wanted a divorce. He delivered his announcement unexpectedly, with no explanation, over beer and tequila and breadsticks at a brewery near our home, and I denied it, fought it, pounded my fists into the facts of it, but he was a cold blank nothing, and my words and confusion and anger and sadness churned crazily into the air, eventually settling into deep hot knots of hurt.
The next morning, after a sleepless night, I spoke with a crisis counselor on the phone, told him what happened, that nothing seemed real, I couldn’t make decisions, didn’t know what to do. He asked, what would you normally be doing this morning? Running, I said. Then put on your running shoes, he said. Run.
As the heat burns the edges off the morning, I wait to feel: light, warmth, the rush of cars, the essence of people waking, shifting forward with work and life. I lean over a rosemary bush growing in front of a Wells Fargo, inhale. My body feels like grit, muscles scraping cement, tendons tattering in gravel, ground down, somehow released from the impulse and urge to exercise, at least this one day. My mind sinks in sloggy sand, thoughts muddle to murk. I hear buzzing, poke a stick at it, feel nothing, toss the stick.
6.
Diagnosis:
A term originating from the Greek diagigno¯skein, which is defined as the distinguishing or discerning between possibilities.
The determination of a phenomenon that is then used to determine causes of the phenomenon, characteristics of the phenomenon, and solutions for the phenomenon.
The perceived climax in a medical narrative used to remove obstacles and initiate falling action.
The art of lassoing silence and pain.
A passcode providing open access to body.
Soil to dig deep into and deeper still and to hopefully plant seeds in that will grow.
An official, authorized illusion providing the comforting sensation of sense, or the beginning of a long conversation.
A parcel delivered to someone burdened by pain.
The yearning to rake smooth clean lines in sand.
A procedure used for billing.
7.
A rehabbing body doesn’t just sit. When you sit, there are those things, and there you are with them, and you can’t, and knives cut into breaths, pins prick at muscle fibers and urge gogogo, meaning the necessariness of moving, meaning the need and the now of moving now, so you have to go, get at those things to do, so many things to do, do them, do, do, do.
And look, now, you’ve upset the body, the sensitive rehabbing body. The sensitive rehabbing body is going away now, good going. You’re going to lose your body, being that way. You’re going to lose everything you haven’t yet lost.
What does silence, stillness have to offer? What is there when you just stay? It’s like it’s the big game, and you’re standing in front of the pitcher, expecting things to be lobbed, and all you do is wait. Or like you’re sprawled open-body in a field, waiting for pain or love or happiness or misery to rain down, and there is no rain, no clouds, not even a breeze, just the flat and the open and a body in the space between.
Every fiber shouts no, no, no. But I am trying, holding tight to this here, everything within me pushing away, away, away.
Catharsis is no answer. The answer is the routine of being, choosing one moment and then another until the moments stack into something with heft, weight, enough heft and weight to shift the heavy shiftless load in the direction it needs to go.
A rehabbing body doesn’t just write an honest essay without feeling failure and loss and a terrifying sensation of ground loosening, cracking apart, fragmenting away, waving goodbye, tossing keys, saying take it, your turn, now. Stay upright. Watch the road. Slow down first, then turn.
There the rehabbing body is, now: standing on the sides, seeing itself decreasing to bones and veins, all the skin sucked against it all, aghast. The rehabbing body is there, too, with you. But the rehabbing body is also here, in scraped away hard hurts and sad raw pulp. And there and here nervously jostle around each other, two ripped, wrinkled pages stuck together in a book, refusing to smooth out and just be.
8.
One September morning, I walk outside and feel a chill in the air, just a slight one, a soft glowing cool calming the desert: first sign of fall. The world is new. Clean. A clean, new beginning. I am committed. I will listen, agree, follow the rules. I will be healthy, smart, logical, whole; I will be a better teacher, get back to writing, regain curves, get strong, strong enough to do things right, bring life back into this body, into this life.
I email my ex‑husband and tell him what has happened. Three months after we divorced, he asked me to coffee and told me that he had been an alcoholic all throughout our marriage, had developed a habit of drinking vodka morning to night, tossing the bottles in a dumpster down the street when I’d be out exercising. He said that the day he got sober is the day he died. I have my own day I died, I write in my email.
I meet with a dietician who crouches over her notepad and says “I need you to” before each rule: I need you to eat eggs, more protein, more healthy fat, quiches cookies hummus trail mix energy bars protein powders whole-milk cottage cheese nuts. I need you to eat three meals a day and three snacks. I need you to stop weighing yourself. I need you to eat with other people, eat new foods, eat eat eat. The first time we meet, she asks me to tell her the story of what brought me there. When I get to the part about my freshman college roommate, she cries. Your friend, she says, putting her notepad aside. She pulls tissues from a box, wipes her eyes, dabs her nose.
I splurge on groceries, fill my home with nut butters and walnuts and blocks of soft deli cheese and nutrient-dense breads, farm-raised eggs, olive oil, whole-grain pasta, bright purple grapes, watermelon, bananas, protein powders. I am feeling indulgent, fortunate. A golden time: A time to be still, a time to eat.
I see a short-term therapist from my work’s employee assistance program. She is open about her life: her own history of bulimia and anorexia, the mood medication she takes, her relationship with her partner. She tells me I am rigid – she sees it in my expression, the way I hold my body when I speak. I nod and listen, so acutely aware of my angles and ridges, my yearning to sand everything down, soften.
I buy sunflowers, arrange them in a clear glass vase on my kitchen table. I try new recipes: breakfast cookies with cranberries and oatmeal, polenta topped with vanilla yogurt and blueberries and maple syrup, eggs baked in avocados and wrapped with feta cheese in pita bread, spinach tortellini with creamy sunflower seed dressing, strawberry protein smoothies, cinnamon pumpkin bread, avocado-lime pie with cashew-whip topping.
I go to group therapy at an eating disorder treatment center. We sit in a circle with journals tucked into our laps. The leader begins each session with a meditation, then scatters cards on the floor in the middle of the circle. Each card has a feeling written on it: Angry. Hurt. Confused. Proud. Resentful. Ashamed. Hopeful. Afraid. Sad. We go around the circle and identify our feelings, then everyone shares and cries, creating a swirling cesspool of sorrow. I learn the word “behavioring,” a term used to avoid specifics that could set off triggers. Driving home one night, I belt love love love like a mantra and have no idea why. I feel like crying almost cry need so badly to cry.
The short-term therapist has a dog, Sophie, a Maltese-poodle mix who sits on her lap during our sessions and watches me with beautiful soft brown eyes. I tell the therapist I’ve had dogs most my life, that the last two and a half years is the longest I’ve gone without. I tell her I’ve signed up for dog rescues, searched adoption sites, visited a few dogs, but never committed, the project of dog ownership seeming beyond what I can do, the life of a dog too important, too fragile, for someone like me, or who I am now. And who are you now? she asks. I wish I could say.
By the beginning of October, I have made progress: only five pounds shy of my minimum weight goal. The therapist and the dietician agree I can exercise again. I need you to take it slow, the dietician says. One day a week. Maybe two. Never alone. I need you to eat an energy bar before and I need you to drink a smoothie and eat another energy bar immediately after.
I’m walking across campus, about to teach a class about logical fallacies, and I’m seeing myself from a distance, and I’m thinking, this is just that middle-aged woman with her simple life and she is doing good things and her life will be a teeny tiny blip of okay. And I fall in love with the teeny tiny blip of okay, thinking, this is what all of this is.
9.
Mid-October: It begins as a shadow, lightly tapping on glass, tap tap tap. I ignore it, but it taps louder: TAP. TAP. TAP. Louder, louder still, until the noise explodes.
Voices and chatter and noise, booming, disorienting, clattering like cicadas, a yearning to put it all in a box and tape up the box and toss the box to the ether, watch it disintegrate, only to remember that nothing fragments entirely: carbon, atoms, essence, still existing, always and forever. Exist then in yearning, as if there were another way.
I call my sister while she is on a lunch break. I tell her that pieces are loose in my head and not connecting, that I am sure I am going crazy, that all my behaviors have been a way to avoid the knowing that I am going crazy, that now that I am being good and eating and being still, I have created this opening, and there is nowhere to hide anymore from the troubling true reality of my life.
A hard hurt hits the heart. Knives cut into breaths, anxiety shakes the can, constantly rapidly chaotically, and the carbonation can’t release, all that bubbly bursting, nowhere to go but inside and around itself, forced to exist just in need.
What do you do if the instinct is to compress, tiny and small, to crumple into one small quiet dot on a page of splashes and echoes? Is there a way to shift the thinking in the mind, like a boat tipping one direction, and all the thoughts piling into the sunny side, the light lovely sheen?
I curl up in a wicker chair in my kitchen, sweaty and shaking, and it all hits: that all my routines and habits have been my way to avoid crazy, but now there’s this clearing, and the truth is right here: I am crazy. The sensation overcomes me, is a ripping apart of mind and body and the illusion of a real true world, a world not real, a life not real, all illusion except hell, where hell is being trapped in an awareness of a mind shattered to fragments and struggling to make use of the disconnected short-circuiting frazzle that remains.
I think about calling my freshman college roommate, but she is headed off with her family for a year traveling the world, busy with backpacks and passports and maps. I call the short-term therapist, and I tell her I apologize for calling, but I am going crazy, or realizing I have always been, and I don’t know where to put my body, the frazzle in my head, the chaos of thoughts. Listen to me now, she says. Listen. You are not going crazy. If you were, you wouldn’t know. But the sensation, I say. The sensation.
This is what it is, this teetering around a void, feeling logic battle impulse, feeling logic and impulse shatter, glass shattering after a sonic boom, illusion shattering world in cold, hard shadows.
10.
The road is dusty and empty, bordered by fields of tall dry grass and, beyond, the Patagonia and Huachuca Mountain ranges. I am sitting in the passenger seat of my ex‑husband’s shiny black BMW. I am rubbing the flat space under and behind my right ear, the small spot where skull connects to neck: the only gesture I have found that gives relief.
After weeks of searching for psychiatrists in Tucson – leaving voicemails that never got returned, showing up at clinics before sunrise to wait in long lines only to be turned away, repeatedly calling insurance representatives for help – my ex‑husband emailed me a link for a webpage of a psychiatrist who does therapy with horses and yoga in Sonoita, a small town an hour south of Tucson. She wasn’t taking new patients, she said when I called, but then she began asking questions and eventually agreed to see me.
This mind has disconnected and disintegrated before, dissolved into sensation, twenty years ago, a year of terror still tethered to the edges, a balloon inflating in the skull, each pump of air exploding connections once thought to be stable, real. My ex‑husband knows this well; he is the only person I know who has experienced something similar, a manifestation of a panic attack he had after watching a television show on schizophrenia. Now in his car, we do not talk about this. Instead, we talk about his father’s new truck, his sister’s wedding, new projects at work.
When we pull up to the psychiatrist’s house, where she runs her practice, it is cold and windy but the Arizona sun shines high and bright like it does in October, casting a bleached-out sharpness of light that makes me feel self-conscious, exposed. My ex‑husband leaves for an hour as the psychiatrist directs me to her office, where I sit on a loveseat and fill out forms and answer questions as she writes notes in a notepad on her lap.
On the way back to Tucson, the sun is setting, toning out the light and casting a pink-orange glow over the Santa Ritas. I am worn-out, dulled down. I admire the plush seats of the car and think about how the night my ex‑husband bought the car was the night he left. We had never talked about buying a new car, were still making payments on a Volkswagen, but he bought it spontaneously in Phoenix, no warning, came home with it right after I found out he had been seeing a twenty-three-year-old who runs a tanning salon a few blocks from home.
But that is the past, less raw now but still pulsing, packed away. Staying married would not have been healthy for us, I know now: too similar to be together. Sober, he is who I always knew he was, and I am lucky for this, for this one pure fragment of life that is logical and comforting. Here now in the car, he tells me how guilty he has felt, still feels, for shattering my world. You don’t need to feel guilty, I say. I forgive. Please just don’t be doing this out of guilt. I am doing it because I want to, he says. Please let me. You are my best friend.
Funny how pain and memories and trauma and heartbreak and love live in the body, stories embedded in fiber and bone, breathing and being, silent but never really still.
11.
When I was young, around age six, I would sit in a corner of the unfinished basement of my family’s home, a buoy in a sea of gold-flecked asphalt tiles that iced against my skin. I would pull my legs tight into my chest and press my head into my knees and try to understand the fact of the world, which is that the world is very big, the individual person very small.
I would wait for the fact to create an earthquake, cause every hard and stable thought to shift splinter crack and liquefy, to shatter off shelves and form into new more meaningful shapes, but the fact would float without sticking, a soggy snowflake wearying out on wet pavement. I needed to feel it stick, to know and feel the size of me in a huge gigantic world. This is you, I would think, pulling my knees tighter, feeling stomach arms legs neck folding skin to muscle to bone. Barely a fraction. All you are is this. This tiny this.
Now, a middle-aged woman, I still yearn to feel the fact of the world. I live small, quietly, create few ripples. I avoid attention, drama, chaos. I show up on time, pay attention, stay on task, never take sick days. But now, this careful structure has burst to splinters, and I hate that I’m crashing through the ceilings of the lives of people I dearly love.
12.
Prognosis:
A term originating from the Greek progno¯sis, loosely meaning before the knowing.
An estimation of the course or outcome of a phenomenon that, in its complete form, predicts the expected duration of the phenomenon and a description of the phenomenon trajectory.
The vanishing point in a work of medical art.
The technique of inserting an ambiguous element that could be dramatic irony, foreshadowing, and/or an obstacle in a medical narrative, or a ball tossed over a cliff.
An itinerary embedding into muscle fibers and marrow, distorting and disabling movement and imagination and memory.
The sense of a middle informed by the sense of an end.
Footprints trekked across smooth clean lines in sand.
A procedure used for billing.
13.
On a Saturday morning in late October, I take a spin class. I tell the instructor it’s my first time, and she helps me adjust the bike, tighten my shoes into the straps on the pedals, use the bike computer and the resistance knob. She turns off the lights, sets the fans on high, and uses a headset microphone to guide the class in a cool, calm voice. She blasts Eminem and Beyoncé and Journey as she leads us up and over rolling hills, through sprints and intervals, two- and four-count jumps.
Add resistance, she says. Hold here. Push. The room is packed with sweaty bodies in quick, constant motion, arms reaching for towels, water bottles, eyes focused, intense, a whole room absorbed in the serious art of spinning. My hamstrings and calves ache, my lungs burn, sweat pours from pores, trickles down my back, soaks through my t‑shirt. Muscles and joints and tendons spark and ignite, run ragged and raw as fans blow sweat-soaked strands of hair across my face.
The class lasts thirty minutes. After it is over, my whole body hums with a calm sense of release, shoulders and arms relaxed, breathing smooth and slowed, legs still fired up with lactic acid. The buzzing from the short-circuiting frazzle in my mind lowers an octave, maybe two, and for a few moments, my head is almost blank, breezy, a sunroom, a space I yearn to melt into, live in forever.
I never want to go back but I desperately want to go back, a contradictory yearning that brings a sense of euphoria and terror.
14.
In November, the elections take over, infusing the world with anticipation and anxiety. My freshman college roommate emails to ask how I’m eating, is my body getting bigger. I email back to say I’m having ups and downs, I’m eating fine, and to please not ask about my body. She feels hurt; we try to email through it, but the tension remains, amplified by distance. I follow her photos and posts, watch her family battle mosquitoes and illness in swampy Malaysia, write essays on respect while homeschooling on the beaches of Indonesia, swim in sparkling waters at sunset in Bali, drink papaya smoothies in Thailand.
The mind remains in frazzle, a relentless, exhausting electric buzz that eases out throughout the day and returns full force at night, when my head is resting on my pillow and my thoughts reenter that clearing where they have nothing to wrangle into except the reality I am convinced I am denying.
I keep spinning, going to classes when I can fit them in. When I spin, I feel good. Shouldn’t the body be allowed to feel good? I begin to feel the gradual, sly blurring of option and need. Is it a choice to go, or not? I don’t know the answer, so I go.
On November 8, the world lurches, halts, lurches, angles over a cliff. The next day, my sister tells me she is going to adopt a puppy, she has found the perfect one, the world is a mess, life won’t last forever, it is time. He has a sister, she says. I agree to adopt her, and I’m terrified. I worry about whether I can handle her, be enough. I spend New Year’s in Queens, New York, with my sister, her husband, her cat, the two puppies. We drink gin and tonics and eat Greek food and salted caramel ice cream and take long walks in Astoria Park, where we jump in the hugest piles of crisp fall leaves I’ve ever seen.
T, the puppy, fills my world. On January 21, I strap her to my chest, and we bike downtown for the Tucson Women’s March. Rain is pouring down, and by the time we get to the starting point, we are soaked. The rainclouds loosen when the march begins, and we wind along the route, a stream of people shouting and holding signs: Keep Your Laws & Hands Off My Body, Respect Existence or Expect Resistance, The Future is Nasty, Love Not Hate Makes America Great, Rloveution!
Spring semester begins, and I apologize to T for having to go to work. Will you forgive me for leaving? Will you forgive me for grading essays? Will you forgive me for going to spin class? She looks at me with her one blue eye, her one brown, and waits for me to continue, ready to stay as long as it takes.
In April, I get an email from the University of Arizona rec center. They are doing renovations, and all lockers must be cleaned out by the end of the semester. I visit my locker for the first time in nine months. The combination to the padlock is still etched in the muscle memory of my fingers, and I open the door, toss everything inside into a bag, drop it off at the lost and found, and leave.
In July, my freshman college roommate and her family return to the States, and we begin talking on the phone again. We catch up sporadically at first, talk in dry voices about safe, big-picture topics: summer plans, house projects, dogs. Eventually, we begin to talk more freely again, about books we are both reading and risotto recipes and her son’s new interest in football and boots we recommend and T’s new tricks, slowly reknitting strands of friendship that loosened.
One day at the end of July, I arrive at a two-hour spin class at the Y, and the instructor never shows up, so I offer to teach the class. When the health-and-wellness director learns I can teach spin, he begins asking me to sub. I create upbeat playlists, learn to map out class plans, choreograph drills to songs. Don’t take this away from me, I think. My body needs to feel this good. I’ll find a way to manage it.
The frazzle-chatter of the mind slowly fades to shiver-shatter, then a low-electric hum, though I’m on edge: it can return, any time. But I begin to feel it less, begin to stop thinking about it, begin, gradually, to let go. Such an odd, difficult project, the mind. The complicated life of it. The illusion of the mind existing on its own, emboldened by language we use to give it shape.
15.
One evening in late August, my ex‑husband stops by on his way home from work. We sit in the living room as T, excited about the presence of another person in the house, a person who is not me, jumps and barks and turns in circles. We talk about work and parents and heat and air conditioners. Congratulations, he says. A year. You made it.
The day I died. He is the only one who remembers. But “congratulations” feels like a hat that doesn’t sit right, that I have to keep pushing back into place. It’s different for him: Sobriety is yes or no. I feel like I’m always trying to find the right spot on the whirling wheel, step onto it, and stay.
I won’t say how much I spin each week, how many classes I teach, the extra work I take on. I won’t say how much I weigh, how much I eat or how often, how hard I try, how hard I don’t. I won’t tell you my blood panel results or what the gynecologist said during the last appointment. I won’t say how often I ache to avoid being still, how much I compress inward, still yearning to feel the fact of the world. I won’t say how often I rake smooth even lines over smooth even lines. I will say this: I am hovering outside the danger zone. Safe, but not forever.
After my ex‑husband leaves, I curl on my bed with T, cooled by blasts from the air conditioner. T looks at me and I look at her and begin to cry. Her first time seeing a crying human, and she is gentle and graceful, nudging my face with her nose, sniffing curiously at my tears, tapping my arm with her paws.
16.
I have the students close their eyes in mountain pose, instruct them to release their minds of distractions, opinions, story-making, analysis; to concentrate on extending exhales, lengthening inhales. Yoga, I say: the yoking of body and mind, the recognition of unity leading to awareness.
I keep my own eyes closed and concentrate on the details of the moment: flow of air between fingers, a joint cracking in the big toe, coils of muscle tightening neck, lightly loosening.
Silence: the difference between letting go and reacting. Relax the shoulders, relax the gaze. Find a focal point. Lift your right arm toward the sky, bend your left knee behind you, grasp the inside of your left foot. Notice that balance is not stillness but constant adjustment.
I stand in the back corner of the classroom and watch the students adjust into dancer poses. Some bend strong, graceful, with control, some teeter and step out, some step in again: A project of practice, patience. The breathing flows soft and fluid, air absorbs into moment. I admire them: the reaching and expanding, the slow dance of bodies balancing, each different, stunning, beautiful.
Let the body relax, allow the ankles to roll away from each other. Close the eyes, release the jaw. Let the body be breathed.
The best body is the body that is calm and breathing and gently moving, fluid soft and subtle, creating just enough space for breath to drift and fall – a light wind, a rustle of branches, a slight skittering and settling of leaves.
17.
Every Tucson, Arizona summer is dramatic in its own way, and this one – the summer of 2017 – has been tough and long, one of the hottest ever recorded, sparked a day in June when the average daily temperature simmered out at 101.5 degrees, the highest average ever recorded. By September, the highs are still hanging on, sloggy now with monsoon humidity, a thick heaviness saturating skin and muscle and movement, easing only when the earth rotates out of the light, releasing, finally, into softness and shadows.
One early September evening, during one of these shifts of light, T and I take a walk. The day has been long – a day of grading students’ introductory fall semester assignments, filling out forms, sitting in meetings, sending emails – and we soak in the sweet air of new night as the remaining light burns lavender tangerine in the peaks of the Santa Catalinas. We listen to air conditioners hum and crickets chirp as mesquite pods crack under our feet and lights blink on in front windows and glow in lanterns strung along porches, twinkling strands of reds and greens and blues.
Somewhere along 6th Avenue, about a half a mile from home, a dingy-haired toy poodle behind a wrought-iron fence barks at T, and T barks back in her chaotic, lunging way, and the little poodle gets so excited she somehow squeezes through a small gap between the wrought iron and the dirt. Immediately, the barking stops, and the three of us just stand there, confused and silent.
What do we do? The gate is locked. The hole the poodle slipped out of is too small to push her back through. She begins shivering, terrified. I pick her up, try to set her gently over the fence, but the fence is chest high with sharp, arrow-shaped tips. “Hey,” I yell towards the house inside the fence. “Hey!” No response.
I scan the street for a car driving by, a bicyclist, something to stand on, some help, see nothing but quiet still night. I pick up the quivery, shaky poodle again, stand as tall as I can, and lean over the fence. Sharp points spike into my chest. I stand taller, try to extend more length into my spine, then hold the poodle by her chest in my right hand, lower her slowly to the other side as my wrist burns with her weight and the wrought iron digs into my ribs, sharp and deep.
The drop is about a foot, and I worry about the impact on her legs, but she just stands there stunned a moment, whimpers, trots away. For a moment there, her world had changed, but now it’s back to how she knows it to be.
Josie Milliken’s essays have appeared in CutBank and Mid-American Review.