How to Love a Wolf: Day 2, June 2, 2019

How to Love a Wolf: Day 2, June 2, 2019

I return to the studio today, solo research, after a few weeks absence or delay or avoidance. For the first time in two decades the studio feels daunting, the idea of it looming like a specter next to my shy desire, like a duo in an old friendship soaked in stale understanding and arguing, annoyed with each other.

Somehow the floor feels harder than I want it to, or my body brittle. I note all my usual patterns, and hope some tiny microscopic shift can be found. For three years now this pattern of laying on my back—the typical, go-to starting movement, one leg bent foot on floor, the other leg long—is a danger zone. I recognize it as the posture of failed escape and it dulls my senses: it is a way of getting current and a way of dropping into a quicksand past.

I notice the punching bag in the corner and am glad for the reminder of the studio's other uses. I consider falling into the bag, grabbing it like a person and falling limp into my solo embrace of this thing broader and tougher than any person, and thicker than my own arms can reach. I imagine hurling myself into it again and again, swinging from the chain that attaches it to the beamed ceiling. I laugh, a stifled, ironic, throaty half-laugh, and instead put my notebook on the rough brick window sill and with it my glasses. The room loses definition, but the light, and the mirrors, and the feel of a small bit of confidence take my attention.

I start a tiny phrase of new movement. It flows. Typical, I think. My next thought is, stop judging, Molly. I notice one tiny thing that's different, or newly clear maybe, and I repeat it again and again, letting the movement trail on until it falls away from its own momentum. It's reliable, this tiny difference, and for this one titrated dose of satisfaction I am grateful. I keep going to make the phrase, back and forth from a beginning to an unfurling that fizzles. Each time the nuances pop out and I let them be more important than the visual parts of this new dance of tiny difference. The movement stays with me, easily: my memory is thirsty to use itself. I judge, I stop judging, and eventually tell myself to make the phrase really short: be satisfied with less, I think.

Now, typing, the sun is almost down beyond the houses behind my apartment. A dog barks. A ball bounces and children laugh. The wind has died down and my gauze curtain settles; it's cool, stunning, and gentle, this night. A plane grates the sky overhead like muffled thunder. Then another one. I can still feel the tiny differences in my left arm, can still trace the memory of this first day back in the studio, in a race with satisfaction I am grateful to never really win.