by Abby Maslin
I felt it again after I took up running last summer in Halifax. The breath, the movement, the clearing of the mind. You wish for nothing when your body is in motion. You feel integrated across every cell.
Then again, you can overdo it. Each muscle in my body now burns from the hours spent on the mat here. After the first Ashtanga class, I walked around trying to suss out other people’s impressions of the class. “So that was pretty challenging, right?” I asked across the lunch table, waiting for an enthusiastic and affirmative response.
“Not so bad,” Anne, otherwise known as AK, a bright blond Danish girl who works in television and apparently minors in badassery, said with a shrug. “She’s a good teacher, Carri. I liked it.”
I liked it too, in the same way that I always sort of enjoy being humbled by this practice. But for the first time in a long time, I was hurting. Physically hurting.
“So many chaturangas,” I said, trying to bait my audience again. “I feel like I just did a hundred push-ups.” (This was only a mild exaggeration, since the primary series pretty much is a hundred push-ups.)
Still no takers. Everyone returned to their meals.
* * *
The women here are impressive athletes. We’re all in varying degrees of physical fitness, but that hasn’t stopped a single one of them from giving it everything they have on the mat each morning. Even Crystal. Not a single formal yoga class behind her and now seven days of Ashtanga in her future. She shows up each morning at 6:45 A.M., ready to do the work. She powers through.
My roommate Caitlín is also a powerhouse. She’s also quickly becoming my favorite person on the planet. In essence, she is another me: a teacher, petite, sharp-tongued, full of sarcastic, self-deprecating quips, but infused with even more Irishness (given that she’s actually from Ireland). Our humor is the same: quick, biting, tinged with jovialness and just the slightest hint of mean. I’m beginning to think this is how our ancestors must have been trained for conflict many generations ago. Sharp tongues do just as well as sharp swords, depending on the battle.
Caitlín’s Irish vocabulary leaves me in stitches. It’s been years since I’ve traveled there, and I’ve forgotten just how hilariously irreverent the Irish can be.
“Well, bollocks, I told her now, ‘Yer man ain’t taking a piss over here! He’s acting bloody mental!’”
Caitlín doesn’t have to try to be funny. In fact, I’m pretty certain she’s not trying. But the rest of us spend every meal falling out of our chairs anyway. I am laughing again. In Santorini, I am laughing at every ridiculous, stupid, happy thing. Not only that, I am making others laugh.
“Were you always this funny, Abby?” asks one of the girls, and her question catches me off guard. No, I’m about to answer, until I pause and remember that YES, in fact, I really was funny, back before every breath felt like an effort and every day felt like a race in the endless hamster wheel. At one point in my life, I was funny and lighthearted, fearless and hugely creative. But not in the same way I was during those long, dark days at the hospital. My humor was heavy during those days, where once it used to be light.
By now, the women here all know my sad story. I had estimated it would take three questions to get there, and I was right. Where are you from? Are you married? Tell me about your husband. Boom.
I have told the story at least twelve times now, sometimes to individual women in private moments but also at dinner in groups of three and four.
No one here treats me like a leper or some kind of pariah. Worse than treating me like a leper (or perhaps precisely like treating me like a leper) would be to respond with silence, but no one here does that. Instead, they lean in with obvious fascination. “Holy shit, Abby. You’ve been through it!” Zero pity in their voices.
My story is unusual, to be sure, but everyone here seems to be caring for a hidden wound. There is Nicola, tall, beautiful, abs you’d contemplate murder for, outgoing and just slightly mischievous. Nicola’s confidence is magnetic, and I am determined to be her friend immediately, hopeful some of it will rub off on me. But there is more to Nicola than meets the eye. She is also sensitive and guarded, having recently extracted herself from a long and destructive relationship. There’s Julia, redheaded and physically indomitable. Watching Julia drop backward into wheel pose, I have to remind my eyes to stay glued inside my head. It was only months ago that she lost her father in a plane crash, but as I watch the way she pours herself onto the mat, it’s clear that Julia’s physical strength is a direct consequence of her enduring grief. She is hypnotizing to watch. She moves with sheer power.
And Ana. Sweet Ana. A Brazilian surfer/yogi from Southern California. Ana is the portrait of wanderlust. She has traveled the world, surfed in every place worth surfing, worked as a yoga teacher on a private island belonging to a well-known billionaire, and even survived a terrible case of dengue fever. I have trouble nailing down the precise details of her life (like where she lives, for example), but there is not a bad bone in Ana’s slender, sun-kissed body. She has a history of striking out with love (“I just keep falling in love with the wrong men,” she contends sadly at dinner one night), and even though she is only a year or so younger than I am, it takes everything in my control not to pull her innocent, doe-eyed face close and comfortingly stroke her hair. There, there, angel. It’ll be OK. I hate that this world could ever hurt a soul like Ana.
Even Caitlín, beneath her wit and charismatic energy, carries the hallmark of something a little more tender, something that can only be described as the scar of some life-inflicted wound. But don’t we all? Don’t we all have some experience with crippling grief? Haven’t we all lost—in some tangible or intangible way—something that was ripped from within? And aren’t we all in transition, never standing still, never able to cling with enough force to the things we are terrified to be without?
Yet we seem to find our way forward just the same. Back into the light. Back onto the mat, where we drag our bruised souls and move them, forward and back, laterally, and upside down, until the spark of life buried in our core begins to register once again. Until we feel the heat of the fire that fuels us to go on.
Maybe this Ashtanga thing is just a metaphor for life. Punishing. Repetitive. Invigorating. Character building. Each day under this shala is like a sweaty, humbling baptism. I feel myself awakening once again, and this time in a new way. Not as a caregiver. Not as a wife. Just as myself.
* * *
In Greece, I am learning to sit still in nature. And I’m wondering why I didn’t do this sooner.
Here is what sitting still in nature looks like: in the afternoon, during our break between the morning and afternoon sessions, I pull on some shorts, grab my book, and nestle myself in the seat of a hammock tied to two fig trees. I am reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and eating a fresh fig with one hand. I cannot read about Maya’s life, the abuse in her childhood and the terrible instances of prejudice she encountered, without forgetting the troubles of my own.
Her words reach up to me off the page: “She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.”
I feel the culmination, the explosive joy of the struggle right here in this hammock, protected by the shade of these generous trees, the drip of sweet fig juice traveling down my chin. I have never known nature in this way: the feel of gravel under my callused toes, the heat of the sun spawning freckles on the skin beneath my eyes, the cold rush of ocean water sending a chilled wave down my vertebrae. Every sensation jolts me awake—awake and alive and basking in gifts no one can give me except this place and the silent understanding I have with it: that I owe nothing to anyone here. That I am simply present to enjoy it.
In my time as a caregiver, I have spent six years in hospital rooms and waiting rooms and classrooms and living rooms filled with palpable sadness and impossible expectations. Now I long to be in no room at all. Just here, under
the sky, separated from nature by little more than the tented canvas of the yoga shala. I am inviting it all in, every sensual and sensory experience, every moment my body has been starved of since I began telling it no. I have tried, impossibly, to be everyone’s everything, never giving myself permission to fail. With the exception of yoga, I have denied myself the very things I need to thrive in this new life: laughter, touch, sunshine, boredom.
My body is adjusting to the aches and pains. Each day my muscles grow leaner and the practice gets easier. I remember wondering how on earth I’d make it without food from 6:45 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. each day, but the task is easier than I expected. I no longer rush to breakfast the moment savasana ends. Instead, I return to my room, remove my sweaty clothing, and put on my bikini. Still hot from exertion, I jump into the crystal-clear swimming pool next to the veranda where we gather for breakfast and swim leisurely laps, my long, shiny hair floating behind me like a mermaid’s.
For my whole life, I’ve felt imaginary stares as I revealed myself in a swimsuit, the same tired diatribe I hear most women complain of echoing repetitively in my head. OK, here’s how we’re gonna work around your imperfections today: Walk as quickly as possible from the pool chair to the pool. Hold one hand down to cover your birthmark. Hold your other over your tummy and move, move, move! Quickly, before anyone sees!
But that was before I ever felt this healthy inside. These days I walk a little less quickly from the chair to the first step of the pool, assured by two facts: one, my body is not a source of embarrassment, and two, no one cares anyway.
I have no actual data, no weight or measurement, to back up my theory, but I’m certain that after twenty-plus years of stressing about it, my body is now exactly the right size. It is not the body of my twenties, that poor piece of equipment I ran ragged with long nights of drinking and no form of exercise, nor the skinny, birdlike body I’ve carried around for the last two years, shrunken by stress and burning through fuel like a rocket.
The body that carries me through my morning swim and more than three hours of daily yoga is toned, hearty, present, and glowing. It is here, grounded on earth, solid on two legs again, and eager to nourish itself.
Sigh. A word about food.
Only a fool would say no to the food here in Greece or try to limit herself in some way. The food at Pelagos is grown on the grounds, and every meal during our training is vegetarian or vegan. When I say I’ve never tasted food like this in my life, the only exception could possibly be in upstate New York, in the village of Rensselaerville, where I was born and where our oldest family friends, the Ronconis, still have a farmhouse and a giant organic garden. That is the only place I remember in my life eating food that tasted so deliciously like dirt. Not dirt in an insulting way, of course, but dirt in its earthiest, most nourishing sense. Food that explodes with flavor. Food that has never encountered a cardboard box.
The food at Pelagos makes for three daily orgasms. Breakfast is simple and the same every day: Greek yogurt with fruit and honey and a cup of black coffee. But after our long asana practice and a dip in the pool, it tastes like a fucking feast among the gods, and I can hardly get enough. Lunch and dinner are far more decadent. Dish after dish of vegetable heaven. There are Greek salads, of course, piled high with freshly made feta and local olive oil. There are salads made from pomegranate seeds and grilled halloumi cheese. There are wrapped grape leaves and grilled eggplant and more exotic dishes like stuffed squash blossoms.
Just when I think Konstantina, Antonis, and Antonis (yes, there are two Antonises) are done bringing out dishes, they emerge from the kitchen with another platter full of the most colorful, floral, and mouthwatering dishes.
“I apologize,” Antonis #1 (the owner) says almost embarrassedly. “We are coming up with as many different vegetable dishes as we can, but it is limiting. In Santorini, we eat fish!”
There’s never been a more unnecessary apology, and we all assure him we are loving every bit of the food, but I wonder if perhaps I am enjoying it just a tad more than the others. The Europeans, at least, know the pleasure of fresh food with more frequency and tradition than us Americans. It’s hard to describe the joy this shift in diet has given me. I’ve almost forgotten entirely about my beloved Starbucks. Almost.
I can’t help but think how much my dad would have enjoyed this immersive culinary experience. On every family vacation, he was oriented toward one thing: the food. And he never forgot a good meal, no matter how long ago it was.
“Man,” he’d say with a sigh at the beginning of a Tuesday night family supper. “Do you know it was exactly four years ago today that we were eating that amazing margherita pizza in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa?”
My mom and sister and I would turn to one another and burst out laughing. “How in the world do you remember that pizza, Dad?” Bethany would ask in disbelief.
“What? You don’t remember?” He’d look at her, wide eyed. “When’s the last time you’ve had pizza like that?”
For my dad, memories were rooted in food. Now I’m wondering if my brain works in the same way. Each night before bed, I journal about my time here. But I don’t journal about the food. There’s no way in hell I’ll ever forget this food.
I won’t forget about the scenery either—the walking meditations down to the beach or up to the abandoned church that sits at the top of the hill just beyond the property. I’ve never done a walking meditation before arriving in Greece, and I’m happy to discover it’s at least a zillion times easier than a sitting meditation. Being in nature, I’m realizing, is all about the integration of sensory information. Learning to hear the crunch of gravel beneath your feet. The sound of dogs barking off in the distance. The subtle scent of burnt organic material from beyond the farm next door. Every place I pause during my walking meditations is marvelous in its own right: the supple fig trees, the coarse black sand, the steady cacti, which make me nostalgic for my Arizona childhood.
As I walk, I am sometimes filled with pangs of regret, wondering how many tiny, exquisite details I’ve missed over the past few years in my efforts to simply stay afloat. How many beautiful days have I rushed through in my life? How many moments of raw tenderness have I ended prematurely?
But most important, how can I make sure I don’t miss one thing more? Thoughts of home aren’t far from my mind. When I return, I’ll be returning to the same life, the same pressures I’ve been seduced by before. I must find a way to bring the spirit of this adventure with me if ever I want to feel this again.
CHAPTER 28
The thing about putting twenty-one women together for nearly a month on a desert island is that you need a lot of chocolate. I mean, a lot.
It has become a running joke around Pelagos that we need a steady supply of chocolate around here to compensate for the lack of sex. Before bedtime, special trips are made into town simply to replenish the stash. It’s amusing to witness how many women truly depend on their chocolate fix to get them through the day. I’ve been fasting from these pleasures for so long now, I hardly need a stand-in. Like sex, chocolate’s just another thing I’ve learned to do without.
And still sex seems to be everywhere. In the vibrancy of my toned, tanned thirty-one-year-old muscles, which have never been more touchable and more untouched. In the glimpses of flesh that abound poolside each day. And in the words of my friend Jenny, whose fiancé is coming to visit in a few days, and who reminds us with a wink, “not to expect to see her at meals.”
More than sex, my brain is filled with preoccupation of another thought, something I’ve been pushing from my consciousness for some time. Babies. I want to have another baby, but I’d rather not admit it to myself.
The longing first grabbed hold a year ago in Halifax. During group therapy one afternoon, TC’s therapists asked us to make a vision board together out of magazine clippings. How stupid it seemed at the time, to allow ourselves to indulge in such hope
ful fantasies. But we found ourselves smiling, taking the assignment more seriously than we anticipated as we covered our board with images of food, travel, charming country homes, and a baby girl with a face that reminded us of Jack’s. It wasn’t the first time we’d entertained the notion of another child, but it had been too painful in those months after TC’s injury to recall the plans we’d made to start trying for a second baby.
Physically, there’s no reason TC and I can’t have a second baby. But it’s a bad idea for a hundred obvious reasons that aren’t even worth discussing, the word irresponsible coming first to mind.
Everyone in my life has been polite enough not to inquire about our reproductive plans, and I appreciate their decorum, but in some weird way, I just wish someone would ask. Maybe then I could grieve about it aloud. Maybe then I could admit the thing I hate myself for thinking, which is that in deciding to stay with TC, I am forfeiting this dream. And my other terrible fear: that I may very well end up resenting him for it one day.
But now, a month from my thirty-second birthday and the two-year anniversary of his assault, babies are becoming an increasingly consuming notion, one it’s time I make peace with.