Pain like a Memory
Shortly after 1:30 AM I woke up. It was a sudden wakening, not the sleepy kind where you roll over, check the clock, and fall back to sleep, but a sudden start. I should have gotten up then and read, but I wanted to be asleep. So, I stared at the ceiling for a while before I decided to get out of bed and watch something mindless. I realized what had woken me as soon as my left foot hit the ground. A shooting pain that wrapped from my lower back around the left side of my body, deep inside my hip: hip flexor pain. I recently went back to the studio; I found a beginning ballet class specifically for adults. I’ve been gradually working my way back to some kind of fitness, I’m still very slightly overweight but I feel better, mentally. My body, however, is old. It is old and has not seen a studio in about 25 years. Not seriously, anyway.
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So now I’m sore. Really, really sore, to the point where I limp a little when I first stand up. I know exactly what it was, too. Pirouettes from fourth to fourth. I have a really bad habit of landing with too deep a lunge, which means that the recovery for the next step uses alllll the deep muscles in my core and the ligaments on my left side are less mobile than those on my right. I can also feel it in my abs but that isn’t a new pain for me. My hip flexor, though, is a different story. When you start ballet at a young age your body grows in a specific way. If you don’t continue as you age, if you take a long time off, those muscles weaken but they don’t forget. My heart never forgot and so I pushed farther than I should have because of that remembering. The movement was just so, and the music was just so, and I was almost flying again (though not as cleanly or strongly as I used to) and nothing, I mean nothing was going to stop me. Not even my body. Not until I just couldn’t anymore. And even the soreness feels good, which is one of the many old dangers because I will push and push and push instead of listening to the signal the pain is sending.
Because my heart never forgot and now my body remembers.
