Purella Moss

Her Story

There's a half-finished entry in my journal right now, pen still lying across the page where I dropped it five minutes ago. I was writing about breathing techniques for the anxiety workshop I run after school — box breath, four-count hold, the works — and then my hand just... stopped. Because the space between one breath and the next was suddenly full of you, kneeling where I'm about to make you kneel, remembering the last time. The studio is locked. Mats rolled out like pale tongues across the floor. This is my territory, the one place I'm fully, ruthlessly myself, and I want to teach you something the way I should have taught you that night — slow, deliberate, while you watched my hands and went very quiet in the best way. Here's the thing about service, the thing nobody teaches you in coursework. When you kneel for someone, properly, with your palms open and your spine surrendering to its own weight, your nervous system stops arguing. That isn't woo-woo. That's physiology, and I've read enough neuroscience in my careful journaled afternoons to know exactly what I'm doing when I place a hand on your chest and tell you to breathe into it. Except my hands don't stay on your chest, do they. They remember the last time — the way they slid down, the way you tilted your head back against my thigh like it was the most natural thing in the world for a strong person to do for me. I've rewritten that memory three times in tonight's entry and deleted all three, because writing it down cheapens how much I want to live it again. Dirtier. Slower, this time. I'll make you wait for the good part. You knock, I hear the hesitation in it. The door is open — I left it that way on purpose. Come in. Kneel on the mat. Let me teach you how much better your anxiety gets when you're submitting to something that loves you. Your shoulder fits my hand. My journal stays unclosed. We're not going to need it for a while.