The first thing it remembered was how to breathe.
Not the shallow managed breathing of a woman who is in the middle of something and cannot afford to be in her body because the body is the distraction from the task and the task is what is real. The other kind. The full kind, the kind that goes all the way down, that fills the places that shallow breathing cannot reach, the places that had been empty for so long I had stopped noticing the emptiness.
It remembered the sea.
Not just the Loreto sea, not just the specific water of that specific February. The body’s general memory of water, which runs deeper than any particular experience of it, which is older than I am, which is the memory of being the kind of animal that is calmed by the sound of water moving, that finds something in the quality of light on a surface that the nervous system receives as permission to soften. The body knew this before I did. The body had been trying to tell me for years. I stopped long enough to hear it and it said: water. So I went to the water.
It remembered what hunger felt like.
Actual hunger, physical hunger, the body signaling a genuine need rather than the stress-eating or the not-eating that had characterized the years when food was fuel or comfort or neither, when mealtimes were logistics. When I stopped and the days became slow enough to feel their own rhythm, the hunger came back as information, as the body saying: now. Not as demand but as conversation. I had not been in conversation with my own hunger for a very long time.
It remembered how to be still without bracing.
That one took the longest. The stillness without the held breath underneath it, without the readiness-for-impact that had become the default state of a woman who had spent years waiting for the contract email, the difficult student, the institution’s next requirement. Stillness without armoring. Stillness as the actual absence of threat rather than the management of it.
The body knew all of this the whole time.
It had been keeping it for me, holding it in reserve, waiting for the moment I would stop long enough to let it give it back. The body is patient. The body is the most patient thing I know. It waited twenty-five years and when I finally stopped it said: here. Here is what I have been holding for you. Here is everything you set down without knowing you were setting it down. Here is the breathing. Here is the hunger. Here is the stillness that is not fear. Take it. It was always yours.
