him and a fair amount for her and I play with it in m y mind,
that it’s for her, and I watch m yself with interest, how physical
pain changes when it is in the guise o f sex or love or infatuation
or even just seduction, I will get her attention by m oving,
m oving, ju st a little more, just a little bit more; I pretend this is
sex but I still never get past sixty and it is because I have wrong
thinking and a girl’s stupid life. B y sixty I mean sixty o f barely
m oving; I never got past seventeen actual whole sit-ups and I
never got to one whole push-up; and I still don’t know w hy
her fingers don’t break from the butterfly push-ups; and she
teaches us to make a fist and we practice and m y fingers are too
stupid and weak even to do that right, I try to fold them under
so every joint is folded under every other joint so it’s solid and
hard and not filled with air the w ay girls make fists but my
fingers w o n ’t m ove right and I can’t make the sections tight
enough. The part I like is breathing. Y ou take all the air in you,
inert stuff, and you exhale like you is threatening God
face-to-face; you push like the air itself could kill. All the air
you took in during fucking, all that Goddamn spastic inhaling,
all that panting like some desperate dog, you shoot out, like
it’s bullets; I got a lot o f air to push out. Then there’s the horse
position, where you take a stance, your legs spread far apart so
your thigh muscles are tearing from the weight o f your whole
body resting on them; your feet are pointed out and your legs
are spread far apart and your knees are bent and pointing out
and the rest o f you is on your thighs, absolutely still, at perfect
silence; and after about five minutes your calf muscles begin to
bear the weight o f your thighs which time makes heavier and
somehow you feel the weight o f your soul and your life in the
muscles in the insides o f your thighs, because if you ’re a girl
you lived there and m em ory’s stored there and the world
banged up against you there, so you undertake to bear the
burden o f it with conscious knowledge, a physical self-
consciousness, a remorseless, aching cognition; and the
history in your body comes alive as the muscles in your thighs
strain under the weight o f your life; the life o f the cell; a
brilliant physical solitude with all o f the self spread out along
the fault line o f the thighs, a bridge o f muscle; and you are
absolutely still, contemplative, in pain, yes, a located pain, a
fierce ache o f recognition and identity; you are still; until
Sensei orders you to relax, which is only slightly less
burdensome but feels like deliverance; and I think to m yself
that everything these thighs took they will get strong enough
to give back; it is a promise I make m yself in horse position to
be able to bear it; it is a promise I make every time over and
over; it is a promise my thighs will remember even if I forget.
Sensei says women got an advantage with the thighs, more
strength than we might expect, because o f the high heels they
