enter sandman

'I can’t turn my head in trikonasana,' I tell Lee before yoga. My old karaoke injury is playing up. The one from headbanging to Enter Sandman. I woke it up again wrangling with a trampoline.

In downface dog my little finger misbehaves. It’s off at right angles.

‘What’s this?’ asks Lee as he walks past. I remember: This is from grade six netball, flush-faced and buried by the coach in wing defence where I can only damage myself. My fingers strapped every second week from catching the ball wrong. 

In tadasana, there's a familiar click as my right rib pops back into place. That’s not normal. That’s from getting drunk on brown spirits at Nicole’s place in year eight and falling down a flight of stairs to vomit a waterfall while the guy I like punches cones from a coke can out the back. I still carry the click with me, this and a sour face when I think of brown spirits.

My hammy frays as I tighten the kneecaps in prasarita padottanasana. 

Iyengar does it the right way.

Nobody should pull a hammy doing yoga but I did, years ago, in McBikram while shaking off a year of vanuatu pastries. This is my reminder of what happens when you stare in a mirror and exercise in 40 degree heat. 

Our eyes are closed, muscles exhaling before we slip into corpse pose. The room is still and quiet, Lee shows us ways to breathe. I think of old injuries – finger, rib, thigh, neck – and how they connect me to forgotten moments, when he’s beside me. ‘You can breathe better than that,’ he says. 

I might be distracted, but that faulty diaphragm, it’s also asthma. I feel panic, a baby’s gasp for breath, the trashbag who can’t find a ventolin with any juice left. A body shaped by years of shallow breath. I don't run, not even for public transport, because i might die, I decided years ago. Something else to be unthunk. 

Jess once wrote that the world’s conflicts are marked on our society by waves of migration, like the rings on a tree. I want to twist this phrase so it refers to my body and how its idiosyncrasies record where I’ve been. But her idea is too beautiful to tamper with.