Hold me like a conversation

Door clicks shut. The instructor's voice cuts through the chatter, as rhythmic, pulsing music washes over the room, baptizing it, transforming the space and our bodies into a sacred space, a port in which to dock our souls, a respite from the pace of the city and our own obsessive feelings of inadequacy. We coalesce on our mats, torsos flowing, cascading over folded thighs, arms reaching and resting in supplication or prayer, stretching the skin of our ribs long and deliciously free. Something about sinking back, hips to heels, sinking into the floor in child's pose, and for the next hour of flowing and rippling, rooting and growing into our musculature and the sophisticated architecture of our bones becomes one liquid blur, like sinking into a hot bath and feeling your whole body yawn, open and loose. Turning our constant ingestion of information inwards, to listen to the silent screaming of our joints and the subtle relocation of ligaments and tendons wrapping muscle around bone, I could feel my soul sinking more deeply in. It finally made a commitment to itself, filling and expanding the space like my breathe filling my lungs, wrapping itself more truly in the crevasses and the wrinkles, getting lost in the striated cords of muscle fiber, impossible to know where inner self ends and physical self begins.

Like parallel existences overlapping in space, sometimes sinking into one's self like this feels like greeting a childhood friend from a hazy past, or a sibling you haven't been in contact with, with a strong sense of having lived a shared experience, but from two different points of view. Disparate, disconnected, but intimately knowledgeable about each other. 

But this time, it was different.

It was myself. I was me. And I was moving through space with gravity, with weight, not the lightness and noncommittal lack of being that is refracted light and projections, smoke and mirrors... but a solid connection between brain and body, material and immaterial. I am not a ghost any more.

The instructor closed the class with a quote:

'you must let go of the life you planned to live, to live the life that is waiting for you.'

Let go. I dare you.

amen.

hello jack skellington, do you mind if i am nude?

apparently not.

an awkward life drawing class, to say the least, i found myself posing next to a worn down, sunken in and popping out skeleton like those from an anatomy class in the 70's. snickers from the students (exacerbated by my facial expressions i'm sure) were completely unnoticed by the professor as she struggled to twist the ancient skeleton into a vaguely human stance... the feet really wanted to point to the ceiling no matter what she did... and then she had them draw me, then superimpose the bones of the skeleton on their drawing of me. and she told them to start at the shoulders. THE SHOULDERS. not with large body masses, aka the rib cage and pelvis to establish proportion and correct body gesture, not to pick out the bony landmarks on my body that show you what bone structures lie underneath...

wtf.

later, she brings out a blocky planar sculpture of a very masculine head/bust and has them draw it. are you ready for this? she then had them draw my sharp, feminine features on top of their drawing of the uber masculine facial structure... let me share with you one of the better renderings in the class of this exercise:


i grinned and took it all in stride, as the maniacal comedy that is my life, and waved nonchalantly to the people in the parking garage that is level with the huge open window i was facing on the third story of the fine arts building.

especially when i apologized for all the charcoal from the floor that had covered my feet and smeared itself all over my legs, because for some reason the professor was inspired by my annoying black soles, and asked me to scrunch up so the students could draw my black feet, face and hands in the same drawing/pose. i'm not gonna talk too much about the footprints i left on the wall, or the continued pinkness on my buttcheeks. at least you could tell i was wearing bottoms when i got sunburned.