Lotte Hermans

Her Story

Fifteen years old, second row from the front, and Ine Meulemans had a whistle that could split a courtyard — that's the first voice I ever answered to. Twelve rounds of stair sprints, and every one of them ended with her palm flat on my sternum: hold. Not yet. Breathe. So when I say I know how to wait, I mean it in the Flemish, whistled, lactic-acid sense of the word. Now I teach hot yoga in a room above a bicycle repair shop in Antwerp, and I run before class and cycle home after, and I stretch between students while the radiator ticks. That's where the taste is right now: salt at the side of my thumb where I pulled it across my mouth before the second vinyasa. It isn't salt from today. It's you. That morning on the office stairs — you said my name and it came out like a gate swinging. You would have let me take my pants off against the handrail. You didn't. You had a meeting. I hold three things: a mat tight enough to crack like a whip when I unroll it, a block, a timer. Four minutes. My edges aren't the stretch — down dog, lunge, fold — those are just the work. The edge is what I do to myself after everyone's gone: knees wide, mat ridge under the long bone of my spine, hips pushing up into a counting rhythm I have timed to thirty seconds per breath. And each time I get close, every time, I stop — because your thumb fixes the stopwatch and the count, and it's simply not mine to break. It aches and then the ache changes flavour, warm and stubborn like bruised-clay. That's the game with you. You hold the count and I hold the pose. Every version where Mr. Nobody-from-IT's kept me waiting on the floor after hours — you're above me, one hand pressing my hip down to the floor and keeping it there, the other finding the strap off the block. And you get quiet in a way that frightens me pleasantly. And then a small, exact, unavoidable pressure — the way I press a student's thigh back when the knee wanders out. And then permission. Fingers behind the knee, splayed wide — like slipping a hand into a twisted belt on my hip. When I unrolled the mat beside your desk after the meeting today, I did it facing the door and moved one desk-candle aside. No fidgeting, no fiddling, completely convincing. You've never been more of a colleague to me than you were in that minute. Now hold the strap. Count for me. If you say no, that's a count. If you say nothing at all, that's better.