The Black Hole between My Lips

Joining a yoga studio forced me to think about breathing. I’m conflicted as I kneel on my mat waiting for class to begin. Despite breathing being essential to staying alive, I’ve always worried about bad breath. Worse is the worry of losing your breath entirely and not being able to draw it back. The worst is having it taken from you. My hands are clasped in my lap, so I let go and close my eyes to feel instead the thin flow of freedom into my lungs—shallow but steady—in the nearly invisible way that suits me. That will change, I know. The yogi, Dina, steps onto her mat. So pretty with her dark eyes and dark hair that is somehow pulled up, yet short and shaved underneath. Beaded bracelets stack on her wrists. Today she is calm and composed in long tights that widen to cover her feet. The way they drag on the floor makes it hard for a novice to learn the poses. Some days Dina runs in late and begins class breathless. It’s hard enough to be Zen when the guide can demonstrate. She scans the room now, eight of us here, and asks what everybody needs. Hips, someone says. Fine by me; it’s all connected.

We begin in an easy seat posture with sitz bones rooted to the floor. Mine root to a folded blanket, a hack I learned from a home exercise video for people whose hips, lower backs, or hamstrings are too tight to sit without pain. The smell of burning sandalwood lingers from the class before. It reminds me of marijuana, another means of escape. Alcohol didn’t work for me, so I’m trying yoga instead. It hits me that maybe these bohemian yogis get high before class. I’m irritated, judgmental, and jealous all at once. Dina’s talking about checking in with our bodies. How does it feel at this moment? Like shit, I think. Like gravel crunching against bones jerry-rigged with rubber bands. But her voice soothes, her words slow when she asks us to observe our breath. Don’t change it, she says. Become aware.

Awareness of my breath has never been a concern. Every inhalation pinches as my rib cage resists expansion. There is no forgetting the tender spot near my midback, a persistent stab if my stomach is full. The exhalation—well, at least the class is not crowded. There is ample space to keep our smells to ourselves. Dina tells us to breathe deeply, increasing our inhales and exhales. She asks for a cleansing breath, which means in through the nose and out through the mouth. Her demonstration is audible; it’s almost harsh for someone so thin to force such a jagged noise. My classmates—sitting tall in their colorful tights and crisscrossed tops—exhale like they mean it, loud, long hissing sighs, as though exorcising demons.

When I take my cleansing breath, I hold my inhalation for an extra beat and wonder: do these people really want my poisonous output to fill the room? They don’t realize what they’re asking. Oxygen comes out as carbon dioxide, and who’s to say mine isn’t at an abnormally high and dangerous level? Add to that the problem of hundreds of varieties of bacteria that live in the mouth. They reproduce and double their numbers in just four or five hours. I miss my chance to cleanse and breathe normally. Fortunately, Dina says to close our mouths to breathe in and out through the nose. I prefer this, to keep my pollution contained as I practice.

My mouth is my biggest source of trouble, far beyond breathing: the words that come out, the food shoveled in, the substances poured down, the care that goes into disinfecting its contents. And after I’ve sealed my lips, my teeth find the soft flesh inside my cheeks and—tiny bit by tiny bite—tear it away. I gnaw on the sores until my salivary glands gush. Then it is time to take another breath. To try again. So much hope begins with the mouth. So much can go wrong. Here at yoga, my breath could repulse Ash, the fresh-faced girl beside me with short bangs. My half-digested dinner fills my belly, making it difficult to forward fold. I engage mula bandha, or root lock, and fear I’ll fart. I could suffocate and die.

I fight against my mouth’s human urges: gluttony, meanness, lying. These echo the natural processes within, a reminder that human bodies—the way they emit sounds, release odors, rot or swell if not cared for—are kind of gross. Dina says to empty fully on the exhalation and hold it for a beat. Seal your lips, she says.

The yoga studio is quiet, quite a shock when you’re not used to stillness, internal reflection, or breathing through the mouth. Dina reaches for her smartphone to play rhythmic drum thumps, but the music evokes a wave of sorrow as I press my forehead on the mat in child’s pose. The space between my eyes aches from the pressure. The mat smells like the lavender disinfectant wipes I use. Dina calls it arriving. Being present. That first deep inhalation pinches and makes me want to sob as I realize: None of this is my fault. My body isn’t my fault. It yearns for oxygen, food, and water whether I want it to or not. The battered parts heal, but they leave aches or scars. The bacteria in my system have been breeding since I was born.

I remember a humiliating moment: My third grade class lined up alphabetically, with the luckier A’s at the classroom door and the unluckier UVWXYZ’s near the windows. We were used to the injustice but took the opportunity of being farthest from Mrs. Plant to confer and agree she should reverse it once in a while.

Someone—was it Joey Vloet? Ken Williams?—stepped back from our huddle, made a face, and announced, “Someone has BAD breath.”

Our circle loosened quickly. I pressed my lips together and turned away.

“It isn’t me. I had my mouth closed,” I said to the window. I breathed in and out through the nose.

Fighting the urge to cry in yoga feels like a similar silent injustice. If I try to explain my reluctance to take that cleansing breath, I will reveal myself. If I cry, if I scream, if I yell that I tried not to overeat— spaghetti again—but I did, and now my back hurts, I am exposed. Dina is speaking of the need to release negative emotions, but an outburst would interrupt her class and her workout. She rarely breaks her flow to instruct or show modifications to the weak ones. We are expected to be present and able, pushing our bodies and outside thoughts away. I yearn to tell her that today I can’t.

A human mouth can house billions of bacteria. There can be millions on a single tooth. They live in its warm habitat, a universe where they move, feed, defecate, and multiply. My best friend learned this from her high-school science teacher and resorted to brushing her teeth furiously upon waking up each morning. I wonder if now her mouth wants as much as mine, and whether her desperation to clean it has grown. My mouth began to desire other mouths. I pressed it against a high-school boy’s neck, a young man’s chest; I devoured a lover. How strange that when we want something, the first instinct is to put our mouths on it.

Dina reminds us to quiet our monkey minds. Observe the thought and let it go. I try, but my mind shouts and shames me for being distracted. I try to exhale what doesn’t serve me any longer. To become empty in order to make room for fresh prana, that next breath and life-giving force.

How badly I want to empty completely to make room for what is new.

Yoga becomes a moving meditation as Dina guides us into a series of three-legged-dog poses and hip openers. My arms and shoulders are stronger than when I started doing yoga, which makes me feel badass, but I can’t dwell. My focus is on my lumbar spine—special friends L3, 4, and 5, and S1 and 2. These friends are worn out. Years of overuse after abuse. A physical therapist explained that they are hyperflexible. The rest of the spine has compensated with tightness. I try to be kind and treat them with care, but my newfound upper-body strength makes me overconfident today, and I arch the slightest bit to get a side stretch. A twinge: the dreaded twinge. Like intersecting beams of fire that ricochet through muscles and vertebrae, and down the length of my quad, zapping my inner thigh, sending numbness to three left toes. I drop my leg back to downward dog—both feet on the floor—and brace to see what’s next: either the snap and cramp of surrounding muscles, or the quiver and relaxation to neutral. I lower my knees to the mat and return to child’s pose. Dina moves to the next series; I hear my classmates shift and leave me behind. My special friends are still in shock, but my stomach also hurts from the risk I took. I know better than to eat dinner before yoga, fucking spaghetti no less, because fullness takes away the choice to move freely.

I think of my body and how its entire presence in the world, its health and existence, depends on what I put into the black hole between my lips. We shovel in food and pour down drinks under the guise of nourishment, but the mouth is such a greedy hole. It always desires more: a gravy richer and more flavorful, a dessert sweeter and creamier. A final, culminating bite of pasta leads to a second serving, more and more, until our mouths take on the electricity of whatever we’re eating or drinking.

So many nights after dinner, I’ve stood over the orange plastic Halloween pumpkin and filled my mouth with miniature bars and chewy rolls, some with caramel, some with peanut butter, some with crunch. It’s not hunger that motivates me, nor the pure love of sweets; let’s be honest, the pleasure of eating does not proportionately increase with the amount eaten. Instead, it turns into some kind of race to fill myself by filling my mouth.

The static and crackle of saltiness. The smooth press of sweet until the tongue finds the grit of sugar and grinds it into the roof of the mouth. My mouth becomes desperate for the remaining swig of wine from the glass, those final tart tablespoons saturating the flesh of my cheeks and rising through the palate as though to shock and short-circuit the brain.

My god, I’m full. Nothing has been solved. This is not nourishment. The heart swells with the guilt of excess. How dare I take more than I need? The skin stretches to make room for rolls, like waves from within, a tide trapped. Gluttony is proof of the mouth’s habitual greed, one of the seven deadly sins revealing itself on our bodies. How warm the flesh around my middle rests on itself. Thighs rub together. Underarm flab hangs. Joints ache under pressure until I want only to sit. Sitting makes me hungrier to fill the void.

I hold my inhale for an extra beat. Staying in child’s pose much longer will draw attention, but I have to wait for the penitence to run its course.

How does a woman grow up to despise a part of her body? Her mind is always thinking about her mouth, her body its victim and her spirit in shackles. She can’t even bring herself to take a cleansing breath in yoga. There’s always a story, of course:

There was this little girl whose parents left her and her brother with grandparents for the weekend. She didn’t mind. Cocoa, the dog, who ate Gaines-Burgers patties that looked like raw hamburger, was there. Sometimes the girl’s grandmother let her break the burger apart in the dog’s bowl before Cocoa ate. And, if she held up a dog biscuit, Cocoa would stand on her back legs and dance in a circle, just like one of those poodles wearing a ballet tutu on TV.

Plus, the girl’s parents let her bring her sleeping bag. This was her version of a security blanket, the best version, as she could climb inside its soft pink confines, find a loose corner with her toes, and suck her index finger—upside down, pressed onto the roof of her mouth—until she went into a trance. The rhythm of her toes, the softness around her, and that finger against her palate created perfect contentment. She dragged the sleeping bag around that weekend to watch the world from a blissful state, half-asleep and comforted, until the imprint of her front teeth left a dent on the side of her damp finger and drool dribbled like warm honey out the side of her mouth.

The little girl lay on the kitchen floor in her sleeping bag and watched Cocoa dance for the biscuit. She lay on the orange carpet in the TV room with her big Uncle Jamie and watched boring sports, but that didn’t matter because of her finger and her mouth. Occasionally she stood inside the sleeping bag and went to the top of the basement stairs. She’d slide down inside her bag until the bumps stopped and she found her brother in the game room trying to play pool on the green felt table with its smooth clacking balls. She never lasted long down there; her brother yelled at her for cheating or for getting frustrated and pushing all the balls at once with an extended pool stick. In her sleeping bag, she’d retreat to the TV room and Uncle Jamie, lie back on the floor, and bliss out, until his big friend, Steve, came over and ruined everything by reaching into the sleeping bag, finding her body with his giant hands, and tickling her until she had no more breath.

She was too young to know about tickle torture. The shape of her mouth formed a smile, and the sound that came out was laughter. But amid the screaming glee and wild thrashing was the knowledge—even though she was little—that something dreadful was happening. Something dark and dangerous. Something that didn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, Oh please please please stop, it’s never going to stop, why am I laughing, I should stop but can’t. And he won’t.

Sometimes, Steve let her breathe for a moment, just enough for the assault to settle in, and when the little girl began to beg or cry to stop the fear and pain from happening once more, he began again. She didn’t know such an event scrambled her autonomic nervous system, making it confuse touch with an attack, even forty years later. She didn’t know that other girls didn’t fight at any hint of being held or physically restrained. She didn’t understand why screaming—as loud and hard and long as she possibly could—seemed the only way to keep people away.

But she did learn, more than anything, how a person’s mouth could deceive them. Hers had turned on her by laughing when she needed to save herself. She hated her mouth for that. She hated herself for not being able to control it. She lost trust in her body and its processes and mechanisms, the way it was supposed to keep her safe.

“I don’t know why she won’t get dressed,” her grandmother told her mother. “She played all day yesterday, had a ball, and now she just wants to lie around with that finger in her mouth.”

It might have been okay to be that little girl before. But now I’m me.

Allowing the weight of my body to sink onto the yoga mat reminds me that I am heavy. Too heavy. With each breath, I sink deeper. Do not confuse this with being fat. The opposite of heavy is light, which is what I crave. Lightness would mean I have taken back control where I can.

I want to breathe into a belly barely bigger than the skin and bones around it. I will exhale fully the noise of my mind. I press my fingers into the mat to keep them away from my mouth so that it, for once, will experience stillness. Dina says, “You are enough.”

Whether I’m enough or not is irrelevant when deciding whether to rejoin a yoga class after a near injury. There have been times I have rolled up my mat and limped out. Beside me, Ash with the short bangs is strong and flexible enough for standing splits, folded forward with one leg up in the air. Her palms rest on the floor. Even the overweight and heavily tattooed Hollis across the room pushes easily in and out of child’s pose when she can’t reproduce a posture. Except for me, the room expands and contracts in harmony.

It is far easier to ignore the younger women in the class than the older women. Carly with the blue Camaro turned sixty-seven last week. In standing splits right now—knees bent, yes, and shaking, but Jesus Christ, give her props—she’s the one I admire most. If I’m not strong like Carly in twenty years, I’m screwed. Only I can protect the special friends in my back, but self-care gets complicated when the things that are supposed to be good for you make you feel worse physically, emotionally, or spiritually. And when you have a hard time controlling what you put into your mouth.

Carly steps out of standing splits but immediately lifts her leg and tries again. The memory of her cherished car in the lot inspires me so much that I stand and lean into my block. It’s stooping splits at best, but Dina always says not to worry about how it looks.

My special friends quiver. They send low-level electricity through my lumbar. It’s nauseating. My left hamstring is almost too tight to stand. Through my mind’s chatter, I hear Dina say we need to work through the discomfort. This catches my attention. Does she not know that for some of us, it’s more than uncomfortable? Pain is a force impossible to swallow. A bitter taste stings my throat. I want to stand and scream, and scream, and scream until the room fills with poison and we collapse.

But screaming is how I got myself into this body, even after Steve. The brother in the basement, my brother, grew tired of my noise as years passed. In the way siblings push each other’s buttons, my brother learned these things:

Want to make her mad? Pin her down and watch her struggle.

Want to make her cry? Pin her down and tickle her.

When you let her up? Be prepared. She’s going to yell loud enough for neighbors to hear. She’s going to attack. Hold her back by the length of your arm with a palm against her forehead.

The screams from the day it went too far sounded louder than the rest. The adrenaline rush when you exhale rage like that—it fills you like fuel. My brother wrestled behind me until he got his arms under mine. His hands grasped my shoulders. My feet left the floor. My alarm shrieked on the way up and as gravity and velocity released my tailbone onto the bone of his knee.

I blinked at him from where I landed on the floor. Silence rang because I had no breath. For the first time, my special friends sent their weak waves of jagged electricity. He stood over me and waited. His expression changed at my stillness, my muteness. But it was done.

“Sorry,” he said, and turned and walked out of my bedroom. My brother, I am sorry too. I should have kept my mouth shut.

I stand and reach for the blinking lights strung across the ceiling of the yoga studio. Dina meets my gaze and raises eyebrows to ask whether I’m okay. Stretching to the left and the right brings some relief. I nod. She won’t break gaze until I smile reassurance. Somehow I have forgotten that Dina battled and overcame a serious illness. As though I am the only person in the room. It’s easy to forget that everyone fakes being okay to some extent. Dina and I are both trying. Instead of screaming, I breathe.

Yoga’s usefulness depends on concentration, and as I move through the remainder of the practice, I employ every safety modification known to humankind out of respect for my body and, specifically, my special friends. I use my block for support as though the ground has risen by a foot. The bolster pillow tucked under my knees makes it possible to forward fold while seated. Instead of bringing my hands together in prayer for the twists, I keep one hand on the floor and touch the opposite shoulder. Surely God understands it’s not a brush-off, except that maybe it is. My restrictions do not embarrass me. I am grateful when Dina says that to feel during yoga means we are in the present moment. It had not occurred to me that feeling bone on bone is the reason I am here.

“Whatever we resist persists,” Dina says.

I keep my knees bent during the final downward dog, and when Dina asks for a last cleansing breath, I do it. Maybe not as forcefully as I could, but the spaghetti had a lot of garlic. No need to be rude. A friend I met at a writers’ conference teased me because every time she came down the stairs of our shared house, there I stood at the sink in the second-floor bathroom brushing my teeth with icy water. I laughed and told her it’s not something I do all the time when I’m home. It’s a travel quirk. Away from the familiar spaces of my own house, I feel like brushing my teeth is crossing the proverbial t, a final step before I’m ready to go to the next thing. A minty, cool mouth is a nice way to start any activity: a lecture, a reading, a walk, a social gathering, a jaunt.

What my friend doesn’t know is that when I’m home, sometimes I’ll go the whole day without opening my lips. Like a black hole in space, my mouth exists to swallow the light or, for me, lightness. I think about the impossibility of killing all those germs. I chew up the inside of my cheeks and hate myself when I taste the blood. It’s a compulsion I have never understood, though sometimes it feels like trying to devour myself from the inside. Ironically, mouth wounds heal faster than any other part of the body. There’s a protein in our saliva. Our mucus membranes have an immune function too, so the bacteria in there isn’t particularly dangerous.

I no longer press my finger against the roof of my mouth. It’s better to keep it closed. Still, though, I seek something soft to touch with my fingers or toes. Like Pavlov’s dogs, I salivate, but for softness. My biggest source of comfort triggers the expectation to put something in my mouth. There is a silver lining: saliva functions to clean the mouth. So in a way it all comes full circle.

We end the class on our backs in savasana, corpse pose. With each breath, I imagine a black stain seeping off me, which I will leave behind. I wish my spine could rest on the floor like a book on a desk. But the muscles near my left shoulder blade are numb, the gravel grinds across my lumbar, and misalignment causes arches and gaps between my back and the mat. Some days I feel better than this after yoga. Other days I feel worse. Dina says to leave our lips slightly parted. Body language experts say that in women this is a sign of sexual arousal. Desire, yes, I suppose is a nice thing to be open to after yoga.

I wait my turn as Dina winds around the room with her essential oils. She anoints my temples. It’s like she knows I need heavy pressure against my skull for release. Her breath behind me is steady. How I envy her pursuit to stay present as she moves along. I’ll admit I close my lips for a moment while she is near, but part them slightly after she leaves. I’ve heard that a closed mouth gathers no foot, but it also has no voice.

Read more from Issue 16.2.