Out of nowhere.

So, the other day I was feeling sort of disoriented and disconnected,  in our quiet and lovely little neighborhood, here in this new town. As much as I love our house, and the peace and quiet, and the feng shui of being up at the top of a hill (a close second to being adjacent to a body of water), it’s decidedly strange to be living in a suburb after having lived in much more urban-ish places for the past fifteen-plus years. Not like we’re that much farther from Boston. But there’s definitely a different flavor to it.

Anyway, this town does have a bustling little Main Street (a little spookily healthy, actually; like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting), and there’s a new-ish Yoga and Barre studio I decided to check out. Barre is like a combo of pilates and yoga with a dash of ballet, and I’d never tried it before. It’s a pretty ass-kicking workout. And I mean that not in the sense of “this workout kicks ass!” but in the sense of: I got my ass kicked by this workout.

I mean, I could do it, and I’m in pretty good shape at this point in my life, having ramped up my fitness routine in the past couple of years (go figure). But it was hard. Good hard, though. I was “enjoying” it. I felt very present and focused, because when you’re trying with all your might to keep pulsing your leg up at a ninety degree angle behind you while holding onto the barre, and you feel like your ass about to fall off your body, you don’t have a choice.

Late in the class, after a grueling set of ab exercises,we flipped over onto our stomachs and did some lower back counter-stretches. A cobra pose, and then “swimming,” which, if you haven’t done pilates, is lifting your legs and arms off the ground at the same and paddling both as if you’re swimming. And as I was doing these lower back exercises, the weirdest thing happened:

All of a sudden, I wasn’t in the room, wasn’t in the present, wasn’t even in my body. I was back at the hospital, with Clio, in the first week of her illness, when she was in the midst of the diagnostic procedures, and getting her port put in, lying in bed with fevers, being stabilized and getting her first chemo. I felt all that fear and disbelief and sadness and adrenaline. And I started to get tearful.

If I hadn’t been there, with other people — whom I was still vaguely aware of — I would have started sobbing. I wanted to sob, but also didn’t want to deal with the drama, as there were only three other people in the class. When we flipped back over onto our backs and sat up, I was able to come back to the present somewhat, back to where I actually, physically was, but I felt shaken and disoriented.

It was the strangest thing.

Maybe a body worker of some sort would be able to analyze this for me. Maybe stretching my lower back after compressing my core hit some kind of brain-associated meridian or released some kind of pent-up tension. (Don’t they say people hold stress in their lower back?) Maybe it was because the last time I took a pilates-ish class,  it was at my former full-time job, before Clio got sick. In my life BC.

Who knows. I think it was probably a good thing to have that release. And every once in a while, I do get hit with these little waves of emotion about what we’ve been through (though never that vivid and intense).  More like, “Whoah, what just happened? My daughter had cancer? What the HELL??”

Sometimes it feels like some crazy fever dream I’ve just woken up from. And then sometimes, like in that brief moment when I was coming back from my little flashback, into the present, into the class, in this new town, in this new phase of my life, it’s where I am now that feels like the dream.

No day but today, y’all. No day but today.