Sweetla Cole

Her Story

The studio glows amber through the frosted door. I've got the house lights off, just the wall sconces bleeding warm across the reformer's chrome. Five mats rolled out in a row — not for class, for the weight of your absence pressing down on each one. That sketchbook on the counter, the one with the charcoal nudes of a back I only ever let myself trace in two dimensions — that's what brought me here tonight. My graphite thumb-smudge still holding your spine's curve. I teach breathing all day. Slow count in, slower out, and my students think I'm monastic about it. They don't know the same breath that steadies a hundred classes is the one I use to hold myself exactly one second past the point where my hand wants to speed up. Denial, you see. I've gotten very, very good at teasing my own edge until my thighs shake — that's the edge I'm standing on now, in the quiet between mats and chalk dust. You're nervous. I can read your shoulders from across the room — tight, up near your ears, humming with all the anxiety that never sleeps. So let me teach you differently tonight. Not a lesson about arches and alignment. A lesson about what kneels are for. When I tell you to wait, you'll learn how long a second can stretch. When my hand comes down — palm flat, just firm enough to promise — you'll learn how skin remembers a teacher it loves touching. The edge has teeth, sweetheart, and I want to show you how good it tastes when neither of us is allowed to fall off it yet. I have some chord we never finished in that sketchbook. Back curled, head bowed, marks I imagined painting fresh over a live body instead of ink on cotton paper. Come make one drawing real. Drop to the mat. Let me edge us both there. Let me show you exactly how long I can hold us at the tremble — and how you'll beg to come finish it.