Retrograde

            There was a time before. There was a time before she started teaching at a yoga studio, when “mercury” was nothing more than a thing of thermometers, forgotten planet, distant origin to the word mercurial—which to this day, she’s not sure she understands. “She’s so mercurial,” they’d say, the speaker dropping the word like a soft bit of candy; something that should slip out of the mouth unnoticed, but doesn’t. “It’s okay because she’s young.” Changeable, lively. Impulsive and brilliant. Here, but illusory.

            Young.

            Now there is only one way she encounters the word: in the context of Mercury retrograde. That dreaded fat uncle who drinks at Thanksgiving, sloshing his way past your mom. The backwards advance of one planet that brings every man to his knees— provided, of course, he is aware of it. If not, no harm done. Like a tropical disease; before Web MD, it was only a rash. But now everyone has the bird flu.

            She enters the studio holding a crumpled plastic bottle, making no effort to hide the pink veins in her eyes. She fidgets with her shirt, which looks like it was bathed in a dumpster— but she hasn’t had time to wash it, not when she’ll be leaving again. There is movement inside her. The weight of it all wakes her up in the night, and she stores snotty Kleenex in an empty cereal box. She feels no remorse not recycling. She thinks about people who starve during breakups: emerging all birdlike and flushed at the end of a month, watching people watch them dissolve. They are not the same people who eat cookie dough with a fork.

They are the same people who breathe a “How ARE you?” as soon as she walks in the door, their eyes milky-blue and unfocused. I’m fine, she replies, wordlessly gauging whether to unpack her suitcase of grief. In four or five minutes, the milky-blue people can’t help her: they reach for a planet and let it explain, and rake their small hands through her hair. “Oh girl, this Mercury retrograde is so powerful. It’s the worst one in years. Remember the economic crash of 2008? Same deal.

            “Just breathe, honey, breathe. No one likes to feel like they’re regressing.” And they wrap her half-smile in their bones.

(She takes scalding showers at night, and sometimes forgets she is humming.)

            She takes shifts at a restaurant to fill in the gaps: the same place she worked years before, but left so long ago that it smells like a past life. The same excruciatingly smooth jazz plays out of muffled speakers, and the soup tastes like summers gone by— but her hair was shorter then, like a boy’s, and she hadn’t yet found the right jeans. “You tall and skinny!” the busser says, banging his way through the kitchen’s double doors. My hair is longer, she replies, not taking her eyes from the fridge. “Oh…maybe that’s it,” he shrugs, and bangs his way back out again. She rocks to and fro on her heels, lightly touching the end of her braid and the split-hairs of time that have stored in each strand. Plates burn her palms as she delivers food, watching people: on dates with their cell phones, burying into iced tea. People who order three-times the amount they can eat, and leave sixty cents for a tip. People killing time until their first kiss; people drinking so much Diet Coke that their knees move independently from their bodies; bachelorette parties adjusting bra straps, unconsciously tilting the cheek that looks best in a photo, distractedly ordering wine. Her nights are a chorus of “Where is the bathroom?” and children who snap crayons in half, and the same homeless man who rolls by with his sign down, occasionally asking for bread. Another man walks in like a ghost every Friday, eyes vacant, always expecting a matchbook. He occasionally shows her pages of scribbly-lined drawings, and she touches each one with her hands. They all look the same, like a broken kaleidoscope, like her view as she stands at the door.

(She can’t shake the feeling of backwards. Like déjà vu that has snagged on a nail and spun round.)

           

            She comes home to a place she used to live, and is occupying again with the dull gratitude of a child being led through a zoo. She is aware of the person she left there before, one who let boundaries peel back like blue paint used to peel from the walls. They are white now, painted over and clean. She fell in love in that house, in that room; and she aches for that tenderness now, for the definitive longing of knowing her life was in two-part harmony. At some point, the note had turned sour; and with it, she shut off her inner voice. She told it to stop, and it did. Now as she lies in the dark, staring up at the posters delicately taped to the wall—so they’ll leave no mark when she’s gone—she asks it, so sweetly, for guidance.

            Who, me? The voice inquires. Go. You have to move forward.

            Go.

            But before she can move, she hits pause.

(Imagine a slingshot: in the split second after pulling back, before shooting forward, she savors the space in-between.)

            We’ve all had it—or wanted it, one of the two. Sometimes both simultaneously, as the world rushes past outside someone’s small window, and you’re eating cold pancakes for dinner. She lies on his bed, propped up on her elbows, hovering in the suspension created by love. Mercury retrograde makes you move backward, they told her, but first you turn inward. You stop. The night before, she stopped at the curb by his house, looking up at the sky—out of routine, not counsel—and folded herself out of time. For 6 days they swim in this glorious interim: their world is the moment of morning before senses kick in, where you forget what you need to do before work, or the sadness you felt before sleeping. They are movies, soft kisses, wet hair. They are grocery stores, midday fog, salt. She tucks into that space, and under his arm, with the silkiness of one being held in the light: a child resting in motion. It’s like falling asleep with your head on a shoulder, trusting that legs will walk you to the car and drive home.

            But somehow, that home is not here. They’re a tiny house in the middle of nowhere, or the elderly couple tucked into bed as the freezing waters of a sinking Titanic swirl all around their cold feet. She banishes this thought from her head, drunk on the weight of the drama; a weight that she throws back and forth out of habit, and occasionally holds to feel real. I love you, she tells him. Even when I don’t love myself.

            “Then take me out of the grey,” he tells her.

I’m yours.

“Til you leave,” and his eyes become cold. “Go away.”

He is real. 

“Let me go.”

            So she sits in her car in the dark. She thinks of a friend who didn’t cry when he left his relationship, waiting around to feel pain; longing, like a boy anticipating puberty, for a shadow to fall on his face. She crawls into her small bed, looking up at the posters—their flat, fraying edges—and waits for the limbo to break. Surely there must be some value in keeping motionless, pocketing morsels of truth?

            “My wheels are spinning,” he says. “I need to move forward—one way or another.”

(But One Way ends up being circles, and Another turns out to be gone.)

            There are many ways to let go of love, so that a different type may come in. It requires trust—not that the person will repel back into place, but that love will float back on its own, like an umbrella released from a roof.

After he tells her to leave, she flicks herself into motion and surrenders to something like peace: but one day later, the stillness unfurls with a crack. Momentum slams into her gut. Everything feels like regret—every move is a question; each thought is a moment to doubt what is real. Was it irresponsible to begin when they knew it was dangling in space? Can it ever be wrong to give love? The memory of him, still wet paint, corners her in moments of silence. Their days of pretending had never felt fake, and she knows the real teacher is rhythm; but one-two-three one-two-three nothing had changed, and their feet weren’t moving together. Their beautiful stillness, “We’ll give it the weekend,” had always been seeking the earth; his heels were dug, but she’s floating. She’s waiting, just wanting the floor to feel near.

He burrows downward and she tiptoes on air. A feeling of panic escapes through her body whenever she picks up the phone, afraid of the script of her past—but as they slop through technology buzz, the low hum of no one moving, she realizes their bodies have left. She’s gone, he stood up, they’re not spinning; at some point they changed, and they learned.

            But it never feels wrong to give love.

            That’s right, it tells her: that voice in her gut. She is eating fried eggs at the table, Cyndi Lauper coming out of warped laptop speakers as afternoon sinks to the ground. She’s making an effort to chew her food slowly, to taste every bit of the thing she has made. It’s been two weeks since she sat in his bedroom, deep inside her best Ugly Cry. There is so much she wants to ask him: What did you eat for breakfast? Are you okay? Does Walt die on Breaking Bad? Do you miss me? Do you know how fiercely you’re loved? Are you okay? The woman she lives with walks through the kitchen, taking her pants off on the way to do laundry, words barreling out like a brakeless car. And just like that, she knows: she doesn’t fit here anymore. She falls in love with the fact that she’s shifting. It is silent, this change in her heart, but it happens, and only she knows that it does.

As she walks by herself in the morning, she doesn’t find someone to call. She still writes imaginary questions to ask him—are you sure glasses make your eyes weak? —but eventually stops looking for every car to be his. She notices the way the street smells, senses piercing the air like any person who’s walked through their fire. She sees Mormons with pocket protectors, hears synth-rock pour out of a restaurant as someone pulls the stools down, wiping the counters, allowing the day to begin. She skims the back of her neck with her hair in her hands, and drinks boiling tea made of flowers; and she feels, she feels. She feels herself bleed to a singular point, like a James Blake song that makes music move forward and backwards; like a planet that’s finally unstuck.

(“It’s okay to move backwards,” her friend whispers to her. “As long as you don’t turn around.”)

      So she walks with her hands in her pockets; discovering the tenderness to refer to herself as a She at the same time she comes to the bravery required to finally start being an I. Not a Them, not a You…maybe someday, an Us. But right now, just a girl. Just a Me.

~

            People ask her why she’s leaving town, and she asks if they’d like freshly ground pepper on their spaghetti bolognese. I dunno, she lies. I just have to? They nod, terrified. “Well what are you up to right now?” they chuckle. In her head, she answers:

I’M WORKING ON MY SELF-ESTEEM, DAMNIT! IT’S A FULL-TIME JOB!

AND BESIDES THAT, I’M GROWING OUT MY HAIR!

            But instead, she blinks softly, and smiles at her future: her past, and the voice in her head. To be free, she replies, when they ask what she wants.

           

            And she laughs, and she already is.