I’m in downward dog—hands shoulder width apart on the mat, my hips up in the air, feet hip width apart on the opposite side.  I’m spreading my fingers and pushing down on my mat but I still feel myself slipping and my veins popping out in circles on the inside of my wrist.  Leslie can see my arms quivering slightly.  She walks over to me—I’m bent at the waist with my head by my hands but I can see Leslie’s feet through the V of my legs.  Her feet are directly behind mine, hips width apart.  I can’t see her hands but I can feel them on the back of my neck.  She’s bent at the waist too, hovering over my back so that her fingertips reach the top of my spine.  She splits her first and second finger into a V, like my legs, and runs them down each side of my spine toward my tailbone.  Her touch is slow, intentional, and almost erotic.  It’s the most sensual thing I’ve felt in months.  Suddenly I sink into my pose carelessly, my exhale pushes my hips higher in the air and my heels towards the ground.  I feel rooted into my mat and I realize it’s the first time I’ve felt grounded in a while.

When I was younger, I always thought that you couldn’t cry if you were lying down.  If you tried, the water would drown your eyeballs, spew out over the eyelids and then pool towards the crease where eye meets nose.  So now—while I’m lying on the ground in savasana during the last five minutes of class—how come I can cry?  Luckily I, and everyone laying around me, has a thin tissue and eye pillow draping over their lids and temples.  The tissue soaks my tears, but how can it if I am lying down?  Leslie tells us just to be because we are always so worried about doing.  I’ve just been for weeks now, not doing anything.  I’ve been isolated in my own home while my children are at school and my depressed husband bar hops before he records his show.  I’m sick of just being.  I let my mind wander to somewhere else, somewhere far away in the past where a glimpse of happiness appears.  It’s pretty blurry, like the ambiguous lines in a nebula, just discernible enough to notice the change in color tone.

In the room, our breath is a unified fire, cycling heavily through our lungs and throats, releasing from our mouths.  Leslie says it is like fogging up a mirror but my breath isn’t strong enough.  My breath is short and collapsed—Leslie says it’s okay since I’m a beginner but she doesn’t know that it’s actually from all the breath I’ve used up from crying.  I can hear the ujjayi breathing: inhale one…exhale two.  The savasana is also called the corpse pose.  Can corpses feel this weight on their hearts—or the spots where their hearts once were?  But theirs would come from the outside, the dirt pressing in on the coffin.  Mine comes from the inside, pushing out, reaching for air.

I dreamt that someone gave me a choice.  Either shoot yourself in the heart or shoot yourself in the chest cavity. I knew a shot to the heart would be instant death.   I wasn’t quite sure what was meant by chest cavity but I figured it was a better choice than my heart.   I took the gun– already loaded and cocked– and held it to my chest.  The point of the gun dug into my bone.   I wiggled it around to find the hollow spot where the top of my rib cages met.  This was where the bullet would go.

My hands didn’t tremble.  I was calm and breathing normally.   It was nighttime and I was in front of a motel.  Each door had a pair of Christmas ornaments hanging below the room number.  Two bodyguards stood on each side of me.   How were they going to protect me from my own suicide?  There were no last words, no final goodbyes, no announced regrets or confessions or lingering pleas.  I just carelessly pulled the trigger.  It was almost graceful, as if it had been practiced.

I didn’t flinch.  It was neither a blank bullet or a vanishing one.   The real bullet was lodged into my chest just as I had chosen.   Blood feathered from the center of the wound toward the surrounding edges, where the fabric of my shirt had frayed.  There was a subtle pain; no more discomfort than the first time I cut my finger when I was a little girl.  It was the kind of cut that created a heartbeat in the tip of my finger.  The throbbing drowned out the pain– I sat there staring at the cut, wondering how the heartbeat got there and if that is why the blood pumped out through the slit of opened skin.

I wondered that same thing as I looked down at my chest.  My chest was like a flat desert and my bullet wound was a crater leftover from a meteor hit.   I could almost see through my chest all the way to my back.  Then I noticed my heart, still beating and pumping out blood to the open space.  I wondered how my heartbeat could be there, much like the finger heartbeat.

After my astonishment had ceased, I looked at the bodyguards.   “Well, we should probably go to the hospital.”  Suddenly I was sagacious and confident– but that is an outside perspective coming from the consciousness that sets in after sleep.  In my dream I had taken on this role as if I had owned it for years.  I felt strong and authoratative– I had an authority over myself and my decisions.  I had concurrently shed my own blood and saved myself somehow.

Before my dream ended, I looked back down at my chest and stared into the hollow space behind my bones.  I looked back at the motel ornaments and wondered if they looked the same inside.

“We’re going on a treasure hunt and x…marks…the spot.  Three miles down, and a question mark.  A pinch…and a squueeeeze, and a tropical breeze, and an egg (snap) to top it all off.”

His hand slowly moves across the outlines of my spine, progressing toward my tailbone as if the tips of his fingers are the runny egg yolk.  He usually tickles me like this for a few minutes and it puts me right to sleep.  Tonight is different.  Tonight, his fingers mistakenly linger too long around the small of my back.  Suddenly there’s a tingling sensation between my legs but I like it.

I never expected this to be “the night” as all of my friends had called it.  My best friends, Emma and Amy, have been doing it for almost a year now.  I was interested in it—or maybe I just wanted to be on their level.  They always talk about it and I just nod in silence, pretending like I know what they are talking about.  Tonight, I was excited to have sex for the first time but I was just as excited to tell Emma and Amy the next day.

______________

The band-aid on her stomach is saturated with blood.  Its edges are losing its grip, curling away from the skin.  The wound won’t clot.  The blood escapes from the band-aid and runs down her body like his hands did last night.

They climbed through that broken window last night, desperately searching for a private spot.  They didn’t care if it was in an old, vacant house with rotted edges and watermarks covering the ceiling.  The drips of rainwater on the tile floor offered a soothing interruption to the silence and rubbing bodies.

She hadn’t realized that she cut herself on the broken window until his thrusts began to push the glass further and further into her stomach.  She didn’t mind the pain—it intensified the propulsions.

After she felt him pull out from her body, he started to kiss her where the glass was embedded.  He swirled his tongue around the wound, catching some of the blood and spreading the rest like paint.

_______________

Before, he only considered my eyes, the delicacy and paleness of my skin, and occasionally my hair.  After that night in the vacant house, he started to consider all parts of me.  He still does treasure hunt before bed but he always lingers a little and then ventures past my back and down my butt.  Those fingers don’t miss a spot.  He even runs his fingers across the curve of my butt cheek and underneath it, applying pressure where it meets the back of my thigh.  He cups my sides, reaching around my body to grab my breasts, pushing one against the other even though they barely touch because they are still developing and far apart.  I catch a whiff of the sour after smell of my body lotion.  It has started to settle on his fingers.

He was exploring my body before I had the chance to.

My wife is a mother now.  She’s not just a lover with balmy skin under the weight of my body.  She’s delicate and eager.

Her breasts are dry, sometimes shriveled around the nipple after the baby feeds from them.  The bags under her eyes are becoming a deeper hue of purple as the sleepless nights continue.  We haven’t had sex since the baby was born.  She’s still sexy though, especially with her new pronounced curves.

She makes a wonderful dulcet sound at night.  It’s from the pressure of the baby asleep on her chest.  It’s as if, even in her sleep, she’s struggling to breathe for two.

Last week I woke up to a slight chugging sound.  I started to wake and through the slits of my eyes all I could see were breast pumps strapped on to her chest.  The skin around the tight plastic seemed to swell and turn red.  There was a hum to the machine that almost lulled me back to sleep.  I fell into a sheepish daze, as the noise became a rhythm.