Displaced

Life is different now. Every day I get up and consider my options. Wait. First, the getting up.

I unfolded, testing my weight. Today, I could not raise myself by resting and pushing on my right arm because last night I ran the full weight of my body into a metal pole with my elbow. Sitting up, I twisted to place my feet on the floor. The pain in my lower back made me careful. As I stood, I shifted my weight to my left foot because the largest toe on my right foot will not bear weight, having been slammed into a steel bar yesterday morning. As I ease out of my pajamas, I take mental note of the bruises scattered across both legs – random across the thighs, concentrated behind the knees and down the lower calves – and my abdomen just above my pelvic bone and across my hip bones. I raise my arms to ease off my tank top and the wing of my left shoulder aches and then sends out a stab of pain over the top of the shoulder, through my chest and down my arm. I wince as the spandex scrapes lightly along the swollen scrapes on both forearms.

When I get dressed, I have two alternatives: jeans and a T-shirt or another day in a leotard and trainers. I take a breath, trying to infuse my muscles with some enthusiasm for what’s ahead. They flip me off and I pull on the gentler leotard. Jeans means belts and belts mean pressure on the bruises on my stomach. I wash my face and don’t shower. There’s no point. Within an hour, I’ll need another one. I pull my hair back into a ponytail.

As with most sports, you’re shooting for grace and smooth execution on the trapeze. The cost of that is hours and hours of conditioning and mornings like this one. I sprained my toe kicking up over a static trapeze yesterday morning. Last night, swinging back to land on the platform from the flying trapeze, I was late sweeping my shoulder around and drove my elbow into the support pole of the platform. My back still hurts from compressing my lower spine last week on the trampoline when I landed flat on my face. Twice. I have a tear in the palm of my right hand the size of a dime that I didn’t notice when I did it because my palms are so calloused that the rips only take off the top layer of skin and I don’t bleed.

Last night was no different than most nights. I soaked my hands in ice water and hot water alternately to reduce the swelling. I iced my shoulder. After about an hour, my body relaxed and was shocked to discover that it had been damaged. My skin went cold, my hands started to throb, the open wound on my hand whimpered at the touch of its bandage, my back stiffened and my chest and shoulder pounded. I put on warm clothes and lay down on the couch where I couldn’t find a position that didn’t hurt. In bed, I couldn’t lie on my stomach because rotating a shoulder northward to place an arm under my pillow was too painful. I couldn’t lie on my back because it flattens the arch in my spine and irritates the injury. I lay on my side, the least injured right side, compressing the hurt elbow into a fixed position where it could rest.

More from the album… I was going to post a set of photos with the corresponding bruises but isn’t part of the magic how you can’t tell how much it hurts? Of course it is.

Beats	Straddle Balance	Pike
Flag	Forward Arabesque	Cross
Beats	Hanging Out

Gazelle

Straddle Split

R. came by the gym last week and took some photos of me training on the static trapeze. With his super shutter speed, he took about 400 pictures, a lot of which look great as flipbook images. Some days, I love technology. (Some days, less so.)

Two weeks ago, I tried a reverse back tuck off the flying trapeze. The twisting harness belt turned at an odd angle in the air (no doubt, my fault) and one of its side rings drove into the front of my right thigh as I landed. Never one to be put off, I tried the trick again. Same result, other leg. Two 6×4 bruises raised on each thigh, purple and yellow on the edges and blackish-gray in the middle. I decided the tuck would wait and moved on to a layout. Result? I over-rotated and landed off the mat in the net and directly on my neck. That was the same night that R. was the lead car in a four-car pile-up. I left the next morning to fly to upstate New York because there’s nothing a stiff neck and a bruised body likes more than eight hours of travel. Little did I know that the streak was just beginning.

Last Sunday morning, at about 2 AM, I fell down the last two steps of the front stairs at my father’s house in Buffalo as I was going to collect a book from the dining room. That step has gotten me before, disappearing into the dark wood of the floor ahead. Last time, I was carrying luggage. It broke my fall. This time, my full weight landed on the bent-back toes of my left foot as I pitched forward into the dark. I landed on my knees on the Oriental rug and issued an expletive that did not belong in a house with children. I thought my last three toes were broken. Verdict? Only deeply bruised.

The next night, back home at trapeze, I returned to the reverse back tuck with a different belt. No twisting = no side rings in the thigh. I was right. Instead though, I didn’t make it all the way around the tuck, having forgotten to pull my legs in, and landed with my body on the mat and my face in the net. Rope burn across my forehead, missing skin on my nose and lip and shoulder. Impressive.

On Tuesday, I moved boxes all evening. No incident, just sore.

On Wednesday, back at trapeze, this time static, not flying. I abraded the tops of my feet on the ropes. I bruised my bottom taking a pose called the Gazelle, which I look nothing like. For good measure, I laid down some new bruises on my lower thighs – just below the existing ones – doing crunches while hanging upside down. (My toe still hurts by the way.)

Thursday, I had to move to a new storage space because the building next door to my unit is going to be demolished. I have taken the opportunity to sort through everything I own. Since I am doing this in the dark of a storage building and most of this stuff is from a period of my life that is long over, it is not a pleasant task. To make sure I take the point, I hurt myself again. This time, I am using pliers to free a small dowel from the side of a bookshelf. I yank, the pliers lose their grip and my fist, with pliers, fly into my chin. My teeth jar but I assume I’m fine until I see that the hand which instinctively pressed the injured area is smeared with blood. Split chin. Excellent.

On Friday, at training, while stretching my shoulders by hanging from a bar against a wall – with my hands over the bar, not under – my shoulders give in to the pressure and flip around to the front. It’s hard to explain. Try this. Reach up and behind you with your palm down. Now turn your palm upwards and move your arm down. Feel that shift in your shoulder joint? Now imagine that sensation without turning your palm upwards first, without moving your arm down and with your full body weight on those arms. Nice.

Yesterday was Saturday. I managed not to get hurt by spending the better part of the afternoon sitting perfectly still in a movie. So far so good…

The only circus competitor whom I could not catch in sheer flexibility and bravery, given infinite time and patience, wandered into trapeze training today. I can say with confidence that she is the only person I have come across in that gym who has not made me feel furiously envious and confused. Why? What special something does this one have that is different from all the others? For starters, she’s about three years old and that’s just too young for envy, even for me. Actually, that’s starters and enders.

Let’s call her Marguerite because I like that name and don’t know hers. Marguerite is the offspring of a hip, French trapeze dad (a lot of them are, apparently) and an absent mother. I am attributing hipness to the former solely on the basis of his connection with the circus. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help myself. He did compromise his hipness somewhat by wandering the perimeter of the gym displaying feats of strength at various stopping points. I assume these were for the benefit of those present, including Marguerite, because they were not sustained enough to have any training value. The male must, as the Nature Channel tells us, prove himself through demonstrated competence. Marguerite remained unimpressed with his handstands and pull-ups. Like a bored socialite, she sucked on her sippy cup and observed the room. There was no need for her to demonstrate her ability to put her leg behind her head or her head between her legs. We all knew it. We laughed at her cuteness and hoped she would not find out that this was the best we could do at a split, at a handspring, at pulling our adult and recalcitrant bodies into the positions she could achieve effortlessly. We consoled ourselves that she did not have the coordination to put it all together, either mentally to find us out or physically to string it all together and destroy us all.

“Don’t get smart and go right up to the edge of things,” has long been one of my grandmother’s more abstract warnings. All roads lead to the Grand Canyon or Niagra Falls, so watch your step. We assumed she meant cliffs and the like, but she might as well have meant trapeze platforms. In February, for reasons we can’t seem to remember anymore, R. and I, in defiance of all her warnings, began taking trapeze lessons. For reasons I also can’t sort out, it failed to occur to me before the class that the class’s requirements might run afoul of my fear of heights. This fear seems natural to me. You’re not supposed to step off things. Its against my grandmother and every instinct in your breakable body.

I have had nightmares about falling since I was a small child. In these dreams, there was no earth in view and no swingset, only my swing and endless, menacingly empty blue sky. I swung ever higher, with that terrifying snap of the ropes at the top as gravity’s pull on my small body exceeded the centrifugal momentum of the swinging. Then, as a teenager, I read Blue Window, a Craig Lucas play in which the female protagonist has survived a fall from a penthouse suite by crawling up her fiance with whom she fell from their honeymoon balcony when the railing gave way. That didn’t help. Now, subject to movie after vertiginous movie, from The Hudsucker Proxy to Spiderman, my falling nightmares are more straightforward: I fall and keep on falling. Trapeze does not suggest itself as a natural choice for me.

Nonetheless, oblivious, we tripped off to the Circus Center. Let me outline the training set-up for those who have only enjoyed trapeze from the ground, performed by tiny, fun, skinny people in fun-looking, sequined costumes who look like they’re having fun. A ladder rises up to a platform about 21 feet in the air (about the height of a high second story window), a net hangs about 10 feet off the ground extending behind the platform at a slope (in case you fall backwards off it) and compressing to about 5 feet from the ground when someone falls into it. There’s one spotter on the 2’x5′ platform with you. Your waist harness has rings on either side which are attached by carabineers to two ropes. These extend out towards the ceiling above you, come together in the rafters about halfway across the net, run sideways along the roof to the width of the net and drop to the floor as a single rope which is controlled by the other spotter on the ground who stands just to the side of the net. When the spotter pulls on the rope, it pulls on your harness. This is a good thing, when you start, because, in your initial terror, you have no ability (or skills) to keep yourself swinging: you’d come to a stop on about your second arc and just hang there. Which is tiring. Plus, boring.

So here’s how the first class went: R. goes up the ladder, the spotter holds onto the back of his harness, R. grasps the trapeze (about 9 lbs.) with both hands, body leaning out over the abyss. He bends his knees on cue and takes that small jump forward into the unknown when the spotter says, “Hup!” He swings out, they call, “Legs up!”, he hangs his legs over the bar, they call, “Hands off!”, he lets go of the bar to swing by his knees, they call, “Hands back up!”, he grasps the bar again, unfolds to hang straight and, on their command, “Hup!” again, he drops into the mat on the net. So far, so good.

Then I come up. By the time I get to the platform, it has fully dawned on me what a hugely bad idea this is.

Getting home at 8:52 PM, I have realized what my problem is. I am a working student. To the naked eye, I am working full-time at a senior-ish job which requires two hours of driving a day. I am also a writer in all of the hours I can spend away from said job. Plus, I am taking all manner of classes. Although I am sure I do not need to point this out to anyone, this is difficult, not only because of the required split focus but because of the width of that split. The isolation and addiction of writing are a far cry from the demands of corporate work.

Also,

– I am taking a knitting class. I am no trendy sportsknitter but I like the women – a clutch of wealthy, funny Twin Peaksers – whom I never see otherwise. It is some consolation to my potentially bruised (wo)machismo that I suck at it. Mostly.

– I am taking flying trapeze twice a week.

– I am taking a killer circus conditioning class to get better at the trapeze faster. There is no clown make-up involved.

– I am trying to work with a personal trainer who is verging on officially old but who does still, because I am pathetically out of shape, kick my ass a little bit.

– I am, in theory, trying to find a different job. To all appearances, this is not actually true, as I have only submitted about three applications in nine months, but it’s on my mind, and I have had reasons for not taking it by the horns, namely a fiction class (just finished) and graduate school applications.

– I am trying to keep up with Lost and Desperate Housewives and catch The Daily Show for my news. All this while trying not to watch TV, which is impossible. I’ll get back to you on how that all works out.

– I am trying to avoid distressing headlines in my daily email from the Times and stupid Dailycandy emails about yet another pretty, young jeweler who has started her own chandelier earring business.

– I am living with my boyfriend, which is in itself an activity, as anyone in any relationship (child or partner) knows. He is a stellar and patient man with whom I have founded very bad eating habits and irregular hours, which we are trying to correct.

There is really no way to get through all this without a rigid schedule. The job can be difficult because it takes up so much of the schedule, but it pays for the rest of the list, so it stays. (If I were truly a struggling student, I would not be pulling down my still-surprising salary and instead would be slaving at 31 Flavors for minimum wage.) Having been unemployed (sometimes) and without 401K (always), I am familiar with the uneasy feeling those things leave and don’t want it back. When I get worn down by the schedule, I wedge myself back into a good mood by thinking about this. I’ll be a millionaire one of these days, one way or another, perhaps on the champioinship knitting circuit… In the meantime, I’m a working student.