by Abby Maslin
It’s not his job, I think as I float, looking up at the broad, sun-filled sky. The idea spreads over me like the cold water, as I try to make sense of my thoughts. It was never TC’s job to make me singularly happy. No one love can be big enough to fill an entire person. It has to be spread out; it has to be distributed across all the parts of a person’s life. There have to be a thousand wells to drink from. There can’t be only one.
These days, my happiness is derived from it all: my sister’s playful banter, my son’s wide-eyed storytelling, my mother’s exaggerated concern, the ecstasy of stepping on my mat, TC’s beautiful brain.
At first, I thought I needed the old TC to be happy again. Then I understood I must embrace the new one. And finally, I am seeing another piece to this puzzle—that marriage is not the successful melding of two individual lives. It’s two successful, individual lives choosing partnership with each other. If I am not whole, we can’t be either.
It was never TC’s job to give me everything. Completing myself was always mine.
* * *
To graduate from the training as an official yoga teacher, I must teach a thirty-minute class. It’s not a tall order, especially after an intense three weeks of learning, but as I am with all public speaking (even in front of my fourth graders), I’m still nervous.
These days I’m as much a writer as I am a yogi, so I prepare by jotting notes. Different poses I might want to include. The songs I want on my playlist. I don’t know how it will all come together yet, so I procrastinate by helping the other girls prepare for their classes.
“Are you tired?” Canadian Michelle asks me hopefully after dinner one night (not to be mistaken with Australian Michelle).
“No, I’m OK,” I answer truthfully. “Why? You want to practice on me?”
After four-plus hours of yoga today, it is hard to find guinea pigs who are up for more practice. She squeals and escorts me into the trellised courtyard where she’s set up a makeshift studio.
“Yes, thank you, honey!”
There’s no other word that better describes Canadian Michelle than delight. Like Crystal, she is also a shaman and a Reiki master. She’s bestowed upon me my fairy name, Tiana Roslyn Fayette. Queen of the Fairies. Little Rose.
I’ve never had a fairy name before, but it seems like something a control freak like myself might need, so I accept it graciously, respectful of the careful effort she’s put into choosing it.
Canadian Michelle is also a preschool teacher, which one might be able to guess from her voice alone. Her laugh is like the strumming of one of those toddler xylophones, the kind with the little wheels that can be pulled by a string. It’s a tinkling bell and a three-year-old playing all at the same time. Silly and heavenly.
Canadian Michelle teaches me to greet magic in my life like a friend. She is soft and playful and without expectations. I let her lead me in practice under the moonlight as I fall into moving meditation.
As I arch my back into down dog and move with fluidity into plank, I am struck by how much I have learned from every one of the women here. They have retaught me how to play, how to laugh, how to live in the right now, how to put down my armor. They can’t even know that they’ve done the impossible: they’ve made me feel safe again.
Ever since the day of TC’s assault, my heart had been hardening, working overtime to protect itself against life’s brutality. I lived through unreal pain, and then I wanted to avoid it, to turn away from anything that exposed my tenderness. When I lost my dad, it was all I could do not to make myself as hard as possible. If the choice was to feel nothing and lose nothing, I’d take that over feeling and losing it all. I couldn’t survive again what I’d already survived.
But here, on the other side of the world, removed from pain by time and distance, I am ready to be soft again. I am ready to welcome life.
CHAPTER 30
There are three more days before the end of the training, when on a break between practices, I run back to my room for more water and discover a text message from my sister.
Have you talked to TC today?
Something is wrong. I can feel it in my gut. I quickly connect to the hotel Wi-Fi and dial her in on FaceTime.
She answers on the second ring, her face distressed and her brow wrinkled. “I’m sorry, Abby. I thought you might’ve talked to TC first.”
“What is it, Bethany? What happened?”
She sighs. “Try to be calm. Everything is OK. But he’s at the hospital.”
TC has had a seizure. Or something like it. It’s impossible to know exactly what it is because he was alone when it happened, leaning over the bathtub, bathing Jack. Suddenly he felt strange. He looked down at his phone to call Jim and Moira, but he couldn’t remember how to use it. He scrolled through his contacts, but the names made no sense. He couldn’t read the words.
“Bethany, I’m coming home.” The words are formed before I can give them thought. Leaving Greece early means forfeiting all the work I’ve done here, but it hardly feels like a choice. An instant rush of adrenaline is beginning to take over. My body’s emergency system has been activated once more.
With the force of a tsunami, all the epiphanies and emotional resolutions I’ve made since arriving in Greece are wiped from my mind. There is only this: I left my three-year-old son and my brain-injured husband to come here. And now we might lose everything again.
Before hanging up, Bethany persuades me not to do anything rash. “Just don’t change your plane ticket yet, OK? Let’s wait for more information first.”
I nod into the tiny screen of my phone; then I hang up and quickly try to dial TC. I don’t actually expect him to answer, so I am startled when I hear his voice on the other line.
“Honey, what’s going on?” I ask, panicked.
He is sobbing, trying to talk through tears. “It’s all gone, honey. All my work for two years. Nothing makes sense right now. I can’t read anything. I can’t write. I don’t know what’s happening to my brain.”
I try to calm him. “But, honey, you’re talking right now, and you make perfect sense to me. Are you sure it’s gone?”
Don pulls the phone away from TC and speaks to me in a low voice. “Hi, love, he’s OK. I think he’s a little freaked out by whatever happened. It’s probably a seizure. They’ve admitted him to the hospital, and they’re gonna monitor him here.”
Now I am weeping myself. “Thank you for being there. I’m so sorry I’m far away.” It is déjà vu: my apology, these tears, my racing heart.
I have prepared myself for as much as I can in life, performing a mental run-through of every potentially bad thing I might expect during the next forty years, but even so, I cannot believe we are here again. Precisely two years later. Days before TC is supposed to meet me in Greece. Weeks before he is supposed to return to work. He has worked so hard to arrive at this place. We have all worked so hard for a chance to finally breathe again.
I hang up the phone, devastated but promising once more to wait for information. I consider the options once more. If I take the next flight home, I will be leaving the program early. I will fall two days short of earning my teacher certification. But if I stay and finish the training, it will be agony. I will spend my last days here feeling guilty and responsible and consumed.
It’s not a choice. I know what I need to do.
* * *
It is not my decision to stay. My family decides for me.
“Abby, we’ve talked,” my mother informs me plainly over the phone. “TC’s parents and me. You need to finish this out. Come home right after it’s over; do what you have to do. But don’t leave until you’ve got that certificate.”
It is a terrible but sensible suggestion. I battle her on it for five or ten minutes, before shutting up and heeding her advice. Then I spend the afternoon trying to cancel every part of the ten-day trip TC and I had planned together:
three more days in Santorini, a ferry ride to Mykonos, a short stay in Athens. There is so much left of Greece I will not get to see.
But my concentration is shattered. I cannot think about the yoga class I need to teach in forty-eight hours, nor all the restorative moments that have transformed me over the past month. All I can think of is TC and getting home to my family.
Carri and Sarah are completely understanding. This is not the first family emergency they’ve seen. But I don’t want it to seem as if I’m plying their sympathy or trying to finagle my way out of my training requirements. I continue to show up for each of my classes throughout the day, even as I struggle to maintain minimal composure.
For nearly two years I’ve convinced myself I’m free of post-traumatic stress. I don’t know where I got this idea, aside from my unfailingly good sleep habits and the fact that I’ve survived this ordeal without a great deal of pharmaceutical intervention. But the reaction I’m having to this current setback feels disproportionate to the situation, like an aftershock of trauma. TC is alive. He’s had a seizure, but he is medically stable, likely to be released from the hospital in the next day or two. We won’t know right away what kind of setback this event means for his recovery. Yet my brain is processing it like it’s the end of the world, and I am a millimeter away from dissolving into tears at every moment.
I sob through 6:45 A.M. meditation the next morning. Tears flow freely down my cheeks, trickling into the crevices of my black mat, as I sit perfectly still, trying not to be noticed by anyone.
They continue through the ninety-minute asana practice that follows. The girls have already begun their turns teaching, and as I follow their cues through another hundred vinyasas, I give up on trying to control the waterworks tumbling from my face. I move messily, determinedly, obsessively within the solitary confines of my mat.
I’m working something out here on this sixty-eight-inch island of tears, but I have no idea what it is. I only know that it’s beyond my capacity to stop. It’s like I’m in a sweat lodge or a sauna, perspiring every emotion that has crippled me over a period of twenty-four months, reliving it all in condensed time. By the following afternoon, I have given up on trying to understand what’s happening. I’m walking around with my raw, bleeding heart on the outside of my body, and I am spent.
Everyone in the training knows what’s going on, but I don’t want to be the topic of every meal. If I am exhausted by my own crying, I am even more tired by being the constant source of drama, the inevitable subject of others’ concern. I am so over my own sadness, I perversely look forward to others’—just for the chance to be the one to offer some comfort.
After lunch, I excuse myself to the bathroom for a minute of solitude. As I’m drying my hands and my face once again, Carri walks through the door.
“I’m sorry. I’m just having a moment,” I begin to apologize, before meeting her eyes.
But she is crying too, and now she wraps her arms around my shoulders as she really begins to cry.
Now you’ve done it, I think to myself. You’ve made your teacher feel sorry for you. It isn’t what I want: people’s pity. I don’t want to be the sad story people tell their neighbors or their girlfriends over wine night. My instinct is to shake Carri off, to give her my father’s most famous line: I’m fine.
“Do you know what it means that you are here?” she asks me.
I shake my head, embarrassed.
“It’s incredible, Abby, that you brought yourself here. And the way you love your family—it’s inspiring,” she adds with sincere awe.
I know Carri only as my teacher: commanding, playful, sometimes elusive. Her personality is perhaps best summed up by her response to the question “What do you love about yoga?,” to which she shrugged and replied, “I like it because it’s fun.” A stunningly casual response from someone who has made this ancient practice her life’s work.
But this vulnerable, unguarded side of Carri is new to me. I am one of hundreds of students who have studied with her. I do not expect her friendship. Or even her attention. That I have meant anything to her at all is humbling.
Carri doesn’t know that I’ve been jealous of her for these past few weeks. I’ve listened with envy to her stories about her own husband, whom she’s been with since high school and with whom she travels around the world having incredible adventures. I’ve wistfully absorbed her every offhand comment about missing him while she’s away.
I remember that feeling. That sense of wanting only each other’s company. The ability to have fun no matter where you are or what you’re doing, so long as your person is with you. I want that again—that intuitive, incomprehensible spark with another living being. And I have to accept I may never have it. At least not the way I remember it.
But I don’t think that’s the origin of these tears.
These tears are for my husband. For the version of him who is never coming back, the one I fear I’ll forget over time. The one I can’t bring with me into the future. They’re for the TC of today, that man for whom life will always be more difficult than it was, the one who should never have had to start over. And they are for myself. For how very worn I am by life, for the losses I’ve survived, and for the parts of myself I’ve buried along the way.
I don’t know what our future holds. Whether the bond we share now is the stuff of marriage or remarkable friendship. But I do know this: I won’t ever be OK pretending. I won’t ever fake my life. If I stay in my marriage, it will be because I want to stay. Because I respect TC enough to give him the partner he deserves. Not because the alternative is too scary to bear.
I owe myself that much. I owe us both every ounce of my kindness and honesty.
* * *
Because I am leaving early, missing the final night’s celebration—the handing out of the certificates and the ceremonial bestowing of the mala beads—the girls have planned something special for me instead: a sleepover.
My bag is packed; pounds full of sweaty yoga gear have been folded into nice neat piles I’ll probably throw away when I get home, so dirty and worn-out everything now is. On top of my load are two heavy dinosaur figurines, which by some small miracle I was able to find on the highest shelves of a dusty specialty shop in the city of Fira.
“Abby, look!” Nicola had pointed out as we walked through the city en route to a bar. After a minute, a dozen beautiful women in full makeup and club clothes were gathered at my side, helping me select the perfect dinosaurs to bring home to Jack. We must have been a sight to that crotchety old storekeeper.
Now I head toward the yoga shala, the giant tent under which I’ve sweated hundreds of hours of my life away this summer, and it has been transformed. Pillows have been dragged from hotel rooms; yoga blankets and bolsters have been repurposed into lounge furniture. My laptop sits propped on top of the wooden chest that contains our yoga props. This is our movie screen for the night.
“Chocolate?” Caitlín asks, holding up precious offerings in both hands.
We indulge like we rarely have over the past month: passing around wine and junk food as if it were a proper American sleepover. In less than a day, I will go home, but for now, there is nowhere else I’d rather be than on the floor of the shala, laughing at the movie Wanderlust, and resting my head against the bodies of the women who have returned me to myself.
* * *
The next morning, I teach my class. It is only thirty minutes long, and the minutes go by quickly. I have written out the cues I want to be sure to include: the transition from triangle pose to half-moon, the cat/cow breathing, and the graceful warriors. As I begin teaching, my voice is not the booming presence it is in a classroom of nine-year-olds. It is soft, hesitant. I look down at my paper every few moments, convinced I need the help. But what I really need is to trust myself. I know what I’m doing.
“Bow your heads in gratitude” is my final instruction, and before I
can blink, I am sitting back on my mat, tearing up again as someone else takes a turn.
The next class is taught by Anette, who is from Norway and is only twenty, one of the youngest women here. I don’t know her as well as some of the other women, but I’ve admired her from a distance. Like Carri, Anette does not get bogged down in the emotional navel-gazing of the yoga world. She practices with playfulness, positivity, and ease.
Her class reflects the same attitude. It is upbeat—joyful, even—and for the last half hour, our twenty-one bodies move in perfect synchronicity. Most of the time when I get on my yoga mat, it is with the intention of entering a space of isolation. Me talking to me. Me and my body. Me and my problems. For a few minutes, though, before I pack my bag and say goodbye, it is all of us at one time, moving in unison as we sing the lyrics to “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Our bodies in downward dog, our voices strong and laughing:
Take me to the place I love
Take me all the way
Yoga means union. And this is how I leave them, in perfect union.
* * *
Getting home will be a three-flight, twenty-four-hour-long experience. More than enough time to contemplate the question I wrote down during my training: Will I ever love my husband again?
The problem with this question, though, is its underlying assumption that it needs to be answered only once. As if I might be able to reconcile my life by simply falling in love one more time. Certainly that’s what I thought at the beginning, and yet we kept falling short. But that’s not what marriage is. Marriage is the act of choosing love again and again and again. It is the falling out of it and the diving back in. The constant evolution of two people who have chosen to weave separate, complementary lives.