Brett's yoga class Wednesday night. He's teaching this class for practice and it's free, his first class ever. He has us all start off by laying on the ground, in some gentle relaxing poses. Brett is very good looking and he possesses a calm intensity. I don't know how I feel about Brett. He's very good looking. For four years he was dating my friend Megan. I loved Megan. She had the most musical laugh. She and my roommate Ryan used to play acoustic guitar and sing folk songs together some nights, and I'd fall asleep to this, the most comforting music ever when mixed with the sound of their laughter. 

That was when we all used to be neighbors and live on the same street in Santa Barbara. I was living in a house with my partner Eric, and our friends Ryan, Mike and his girlfriend Laura. Brett and Megan lived up the street. Eric and I were recently married. Mike and I were falling in and out of love with each other all the time. I always loved Ryan - what was not to love? I loved his bad songwriting, his vegetable-soy sauce-rice concoctions, our Eco Emo Society (wherein we would joke about eating our own poop instead of flushing it away out of reverence for Mother Gaia), his small hairy body, his hugs, and the smell of his room - a mixture of musty old blankets, marijuana, guitar polish, and man scent. I loved Laura too, with the unapologetic ease she had about her, and her refreshing lack of pretense or bullshit. It was a tentative love because of the circumstances, but a true love all the same.

Later that year Megan and Brett split up, and Megan moved to San Francisco. When Ryan moved north, too, I thought I couldn’t live in a house with Mike, without Ryan. One cold day in spring, I talked to Mike on the porch about my feelings. “Why would you still want to live with me?” I said. “It's like torture.” He said he could handle it. He said, very delicately, “Do you want me to say that ‘this’ is never going to happen? Because 'this' will never happen." Somehow that solved things. Mike is sweetness, he is something else, but he is also the kind of person who would get upset because he got a scratch on his bike, and so sometimes I can’t relate. No doubt the feeling is mutual. "Oh, so you felt your left hip float away from your right ear today in yoga class, Candice? And that was better than drinking wine and eating pizza with us how? I don't get it." 

I don't know how I feel about Brett. We were in the same department together at UCSB. He was a grad student and I was an undergrad. He had a reputation for being the “hot TA” for my favorite class, but I didn't like him, I liked the professor. Oh, I had it bad for that professor. He was so very small and had the long hair and glistening teeth and tremendous heart of a lion. He was a philosopher, and he had a way with Heidegger, with Hegel, with Nietzche, and the Christian mystics. He loved to quote this 12th century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart. "If you look for paths to God, you'll find paths, and lose God," he would say. Of course, he always said this in an academic context, and I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. On the other hand, the sparkle in his eyes told me that at the end of the day, I did know what he was talking about, and it was the only Something that mattered to me. After I graduated he sent me an email that said "I loved having you in my classes" – LOVED, and that went right down to my bones. Brett was an afterthought, there were a hundred girls in that class. Let them have at him, I thought. Let me have my strange secret true love love.

Before his class starts Brett shakes my hand and asks where my husband is. Oh, cute yoga boy, from my department at UCSB, where do I begin? I hate that question! It's like slamming a door shut on a birthday party, or telling your neighbors to turn their music down on a Saturday, or something. I don't know. Perhaps I am just being melodramatic. "Listen, honey, I ain't married. Do you see a ring? Yeah, I live with somebody. Yeah, we had a wedding. Sure, it's the same guy you know. We're going through a thing... it's like a 'separate but together' thing. I don't know what's going to happen. It is what it is, but I'd appreciate it if you'd just call him Eric." Yeah, can't say that - that would sound kind of inappropriate, not to mention insane. How about, "He's on a date with another lady. I'm here for the distraction of cute yoga boys such as yourself, because I'm heartbreakingly in love with the owner of this studio, and it feels like I'm being burned by the sun." That's kind of the truth, but I don't say that either. "He doesn't like yoga," I say instead. A lie! A bald-faced lie. But how do I tell the truth? The truth always sounds like a lie and a lie always sounds like the truth. So, four untrue words it is. I roll out my mat and wait for some instructions.

The owner of the yoga studio is Eddie. He's not that handsome, nothing to write home about. That said, he is the most devastatingly handsome. He is one of god's strangest and most beautiful creatures. He is not any type of person; he is the best type of person. He knows Something. He primarily communicates this by reminding his students that they are alive and so they should breathe. Sounds simple, but hey, it's the singer not the song - Eddie does it all the way, and holy shit, is it something special. I love Eddie into my bones, a loud joyful clamoring aching swirling shapeless flamboyant love. He is successfully keeping me at bay, though I'm pretty sure the main obstacle to our potential romance is the age discrepancy. I'm 23, he's somewhere in the ballpark of my step-dad's age, and he doesn't hesitate to remind me of that on a regular basis. However, I'm very tenacious, and I don't believe in such obstacles as age discrepancy. After all, a shape is a shape is a shape - Eddie says that in his classes all the time.

While we're lying on the floor in a gentle twist, Brett puts on an Explosions in the Sky song. The wind is whipping around outside, the lights are dim, and oh shit, here we go. There is nothing outside of this moment. I’m crying. I often cry in yoga classes, you'll see why if you ever go - it can be very cathartic. My heart, oh, my stupid heart. My heart, my heart, so big that I must figure out a plan to shrink it down to a more manageable size.

I tell myself, of course you would like to have sex with attractive men, you are a 23-year-old woman, you're not a eunuch. Of course you would fall in love with everyone all the time, there are so many people, there is so much to love. You don't love Brett, I tell myself, you don't love him. But if that’s true, I don’t love Ryan, I don’t love Eddie, I don’t love Eric, I don't love Mike, I don't love Megan, I don't love my old professor, I don't love Laura, I don't love anybody. And it's not true. I love everybody! I am falling in love with Brett as I hug him goodbye – two times, and his beard scruff scratches against my skin. Once, my friend Katie asked me if I would ever consider being with a lady. I said, "Listen, I’m not totally committed to this whole straight girl thing. I love women. But I loooooove men," and she said, “Oh my god, when you said that just now, I felt a fire inside!” That is the fire of my scratchy beard love. I tell Brett, "I take it back. Eric likes yoga sometimes, and he would have liked this." Still not the truth. Closer, but still cold. Jesus Christ I am terrible at talking, but it's something. 

How do you tell anyone what you are? How do you bridge that unfillable chasm? How do you reach arms out of your heart? It's not sexual, sometimes it’s sexual, I'm 23. I'm pretty sure there's nothing outside of this moment. If that's true then I've gone crazy, I'm losing my grip, I'm totally lost at sea - holy shit, I'm gonna fall to pieces. There's nothing outside of this moment. There are times and relationships that transcend sexuality. My life is full of all kinds of bizarre romances that I didn't choose, romances like the one that is going on in this room with Brett, that’s happening in here on this hardwood floor while the wind whips around furiously outside, with all these adorable first-time yoga practitioners. I'm participating, and I get to watch from the sidelines, simultaneously. After all, how can "I" be involved? Me, who is... what? I love everybody, I don't love anybody, the truth always sounds like a lie and the truth is... the truth is, I love when I don't know what I am, and for a moment I feel that way - Explosions in the Sky on the stereo and Brett at the front of Eddie's classroom, the mysterious sting of a love which is so big it can never be captured or named burning in my eyes.

How can I see life in any way but a narrative fashion? All these characters, all these beautiful lines, all these unexpected turns. How can I not believe I'm the protagonist in my own novel, in my very own play? How can I not think that I wrote you all in? And wow, you guys are good actors! Very believable. I suppose it’s possible that I'm the world's biggest narcissist; I’ll never know if I’m that person. There is nothing outside of this moment. At the very end of class Brett is telling that joke, the same joke Eddie told in his class the day before I went to New York, but now Brett's telling it, now I'm hearing it again. There is nothing outside of this moment. Here's the joke. It’s a story about George Burns, the comedian who lived to be 100. When George Burns was 90, a gorgeous 24-year-old woman came up to him backstage, and said, “Mr. Burns, I’m such a fan of your work, and I’m here to offer you super sex.” George Burns thinks about it for a minute, puts out his cigar, and says: "I'll take the soup." 

And it’s the story of my life, that’s the problem right there - they always choose the soup.