Each day the body gets stronger

by Faune Albert

Open the palm, stretch the fingers wide, then bend them at the knuckles, where their smile lines crinkle. Muscle, tendon, bone—what makes these fingers work—fingers curled into talons, then extended gracefully. Open, and again, each movement a lesson in assertion, fingers learning to grip, to hold on, and sometimes to let go. 

Leg lies long against the floor, muscles stretch, burn, loosen, leg bent at the knee, calf raising, foot arched, toes reaching up, hipbone releases. Lower and raise, inhale, exhale, fat, muscle, tissue, body coming to life. Leg slow, then eager to take weight, to perform the work of supporting. Leg with electricity surging through it, calling to its twin: ‘let’s run.’ 

Slow down, leg. Slow down. 

Leg and arm and mouth, too, lifting, left side catching up. Brain learning to breathe again without a crushing weight against it, without the weight of blood pooling beneath. Without blood leaking, pooling, crushing brain. Taking space. Brain learning to remember. Muscle growing, thickening, following old paths, forging new ones, unfurling like petals.

It is springtime. Each year the earth’s atrophy reawakening, newness settling its bones, becoming, again, again. Each year, process, the things we leave behind. Like the memory of failure, a falling water glass from a hand that could not hold, crawling across the kitchen floor when legs would not carry me.

The memory of failure, a body failing and returning to itself. The memory of return. Slow, like day breaking.