AM: more like 25 minutes of basketball. PM: Half mile on the
treadmill, barefoot, as in literally barefooted. It hurts the first
couple of days but you'd be surprised how quickly that goes away.
Yoga was good for my hip flexors. I always feel so calm afterwards. I
have been very frustrated with my life lately, feeling as though I am
caught in stasis, doing only what is required for upkeep: I eat, I
sleep, I clean, I work out, I go to work. I drive myself around and
every day I end up exactly where I started, with almost no change. I
worry constantly that I am getting fat; I never am. Today when I
left work to drive to the gym, it was raining. I could hear it on the
roof at work, earlier. While I was on the treadmill, Jeopardy! was
interrupted by a weather advisory, and they had closed the pool. But
when I got out of yoga class at quarter of eight, feeling straight and
calm, it was over: there were a few swimmers repopulating the pool and
when I went outside, the stormy heat had given into a warm, slightly
tropical evening, comforting and close. The sky was covered with every
shade of grey and muted pink and dusty orange, in delicate washes like a
watercolor painting, punctuated by the jagged outlines of the cloud
cover in retreat. Walking to my car, I felt light through my
shoulders and chest, as though all the connections in my whole self had
been eased and smoothed. I had no seams anywhere, even where my body
becomes my mind, no gaps and no crushed parts. I had driven a little
ways down the road, which began to curve to the left, when I noticed
over my left shoulder a vibrant rainbow arcing into the sky just behind
the gym. Every color shone vibrantly, from the bright red to the crisp
purple, just the way we drew it when we were kids trying to get our
crayon lines close enough without letting the colors blend into each
other. When that kind of thing happens, the best thing to do is
just stop the car and look, so I did that. I put my blinkers on and sat
in the right-hand lane, staring over my shoulder at the rainbow, passively letting it sink in. I thought about how A would pull out her
iPhone and begin snapping photos of it. I realized that no photo would
ever capture this moment sufficiently. I made peace with that thought,
and let it fall away from me.
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