Today’s soundtrack: My frame is here but the mind is gone, gone away
Today at 12:32pm: Trying to hold position, but shaking.


After the events of Saturday night I went to bed around 5am. Sunday morning I slept through the house phone and the cell both ringing around 11am. At 11:30am I finally picked up. If I had hair it would have been all disheveled and fucked-up.

“Rain, it’s Jenny. Did I wake you up?”

“S’okay,” I said, trying not to sound gruff.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Will you be ready?”

“I’ll be ready,” I said.

Jenny’s been flitting in and out of my life for the past five years. I met her right before I moved to Japan. I have an inkling if I hadn’t gone to Japan, Jenny and I might have started dating, and perhaps never stopped.

When I came back from Japan a year later I had strings that belonged to a lovely and gracious painter back in Tokyo. I met up with Jenny again, we had dinner at some Asian joint on the west side, but a little something had changed in both of us and the timing was all wrong. We became friends.

Here’s a picture of Jenny from a couple years ago:

She studies Tae Kwon Do and I study Hapkido. Both arts have kicks, and lately our flexibility’s gone to shit so we decided to do something about it. On this Sunday morning Jenny and I are supposed to meet up to stretch.

At 11:50am Jenny showed up looking, unfortunately, cute as all hell--I don’t need these kinds of distractions--and then she changed into her workout gear, which didn’t ameliorate the situation. I am a slave to testosterone.

After gulping down my coffee I went into my room to change and tried to clear my mind. As I took my shirt off, she came to the door of my room and peeked in. “Have you always had that?” she asked, drawing a grid on her stomach with one finger and pointing to my stomach with the other. I’m pretty scrawny but sort of cut.

“It goes up and down,” I explained. “If I eat shit for two weeks it goes away, if I go to the dojang every other day it comes back.” I know Jenny probably sees me as just a platonic friend but I couldn’t help feeling some kind of sexual tension, and either that or the coffee started to make me jittery. I was thankful when she turned away from the door and I hastily changed.

We stood across from each other and swung our legs back and forth, up, down, side, back. Unkinked all of our joints top-to-bottom. After the dynamic stretches we moved on to the static and isometric.

When you’re assisting someone in the butterfly stretch (sitting with their feet drawn towards their crotch, soles touching), it requires you to lean over your partner and gently press down on their thighs while they exhale deeply.

I’ve done this a thousand times at the dojang with my sweat-covered hapkido mates and it’s not an issue; but the only times I’ve been this physically close to a woman in my apartment, we were exchanging fluids.

I tried to clear my mind and tried desperately not to inhale with my nose so I wouldn’t smell her perfume or shampoo or whatever. You are confused. You just broke up with a girl recently. You just went from a period of constant sex to no sex and now you’re feeling the burn. You don’t know which way is up. Get it together, man.

After the stretching workout both of us were sweating. We took a few minutes to cool down, then she changed back into her street clothes.

“Are we gonna do this regularly?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “We should get it in while we can because we’re both single now. If you start dating someone and I start dating someone, it’ll be impossible to find the time.”

There was perhaps another sentence that could have come after this and made good logical sense, but it went unsaid as we both walked to the front door of my apartment. She gathered her bags, I made some perfunctory jokes about the amount of stuff she had to carry, and then she left.

I wanted to go back to my bed and stare at the ceiling but I was wide awake. And anyway, I don’t know which way is up; I might end up staring at the floor.