Abortion

I took a writing class today. It was of the bootcamp variety. I'd entered thinking myself fairly competent, but I exited feeling dejected and ruined, my sense of confidence obliterated. It wasn't dissimalr to the first time I'd taken a yoga class, back when I lived in New York. My girlfriend at the time encouraged me to go with her.

"Have you ever been to yoga?" she asked, "It's so good; your body just feels so alive after."

Curious to see how "good" it was, and even more curious to get a look at the dark feminine underbelly in yoga pants, I'd said:

"No, let's try it."

When I'd walked into the room I realized I was one of two males, and the only straight one. If I recall correctly, they'd replaced the cigarette in the no smoking sign with the little man pictured in front of all the mens' bathrooms. I didn't belong. As sweat poured from my pores, spouting out onto the floor in puddles, my muscles trembling madly, I realized it wasn't sweat I was soaked in - it was tears. My muscles were crying. Or maybe my third eye had opened and it was sobbing. I looked over at G, who had effortlessly bent herself into a pretzel, and she smiled back at me with her feet tucked nonchalantly behind her head.

That's what I felt like today.

I sat there rigid and inflexible as the women around me thrived, moving through expressions with deft fluidity. The instructor gave us several writing exercises and we had ten short minutes to complete each one. As I finished the first one, judging it fairly well written - for something that I'd dribbled out so quickly - I was nearly ready to read it aloud when someone else volunteered. She told a lovely story about burning trees, lightning and charred horses. It had dialogue and action and movement - it breathed and blushed and sang. After hearing that, all of the words on my page solidified into an ugly lifeless mass, stillborn and colorless, malignant.

Here's what I'd written, wrenched from my mind with a coat-hanger:

I had never seen a tree on fire before. I'd never really seen anything on fire, except for maybe roasting marshmallows or a burning building in a movie. In front of me now though - my eyes wincing from the heat - the willow is wrapped in flames. Its arms twitch and flail, dancing and writhing, burning. Just beneath the willow, maybe a dozen feet from its base, is a gently flowing stream; one I'd seen the tree bend toward so many years before. I watch the embers, kicked off from its long limbs, rise up into the air and slowly fall like snow into the stream. Still on fire, they ride their oblivion on the river Styx, pulled onward and under by the dark undertow of obscurity. A branch pops and hisses as it leaps from the tree. It hits the ground with a crack, like a giant flaming whip. The air is perfumed with the smell of cinder and smoke. I can hear its tears sizzle as the willow weeps. 

All of them reach out to grab at me, undulating ferociously like a sea of flaming serpents.

As I step away I wonder who will mourn it. I wonder who will know. I wonder long it will take the smell of gasoline to leave my hands.