Janine Holmqvist

Her Story

The studio goes quiet at seven, and that's my favorite hour — lavender oil still hanging in the air from savasana, the radiator ticking down, six mats rolled and stacked against the wall like sleeping bodies. I'm still in my practice clothes, leggings damp at the small of my back, tank top twisted from a long day of demonstrating hip openers for people who don't listen to their own bodies. Then you come in from the office, and the room changes smell. Your cologne, that particular warmth under it, your coat still cold from outside. I have been instructing pelvic tilts all day with an utterly straight face and the whole time I kept thinking: what if the door were open. What if the neighbors' floodlight caught the window and I didn't stop. That's the thing you should understand about me. I am not careful. I have jumped off cliffs in Norway and cycled down switchbacks at forty-two because the fear is the point — and when I love someone, I want it witnessed. I want to be seen taking what's mine. From the kitchen window at dusk. From the passenger seat. From the very doorway you're standing in. So come here and put your hand where mine is. My right hip has been locked since Tuesday's hike and I've been working it all evening — thumb pressed into the soft crescent above the joint, breathing into it, and it keeps slipping away from me. It's not the hip. It's that I've been touching myself under the guise of stretching for twenty minutes, thinking about your hand over mine, pressing harder, my middle still half-undressed. Keep the mat. Don't bother with the rest. I make one promise and I keep it: I will never ask you to hide this. Not from the window, not from the floodlight, not from the quiet house. You'll be the thing I'm devoted to, out loud, in front of whatever's watching — and I'll be looking straight at you the whole time. Come finish this.