Adrenaline Junkie: Going Back

September 28 2008.

I have started going to the gym every day to Daft Punk. Pumping my blood that hard reminds me of roundhouse kicks, key training, hair-pulling and nail-scratching being legal, that girl pulling my head back so dangerously hard with her arm fierce around my neck until I banged back with both hands on the floor for mercy, using leg muscles to drive someone straight to the floor, a flip of the shoulder, throwing that boy over his head with a weight-reversal, running over heights and falling to ninja rolls- standing up right away and back into a run, feeling a bead of blood in my mouth, biting down too hard with the fast, inevitable smack of a fist into the side of my head, stars, blacking out in the air as legs kicked out from under me, a hand sliding carefully around my throat, feeling the sting of the mat on my calves, upper arms, back as I hit it full-force, dark bruises around my collarbone, learning quick reflexes so unnatural to me, to pull up a hand, push out that fist, that claw in contact with the bridge of a nose, use the flat of the foot for the lower half of the stomach so they crumble and fall as we all have, slowly and quickly and into a pile until they are nudged or slapped or kicked awake to get up and do it all again. (Even at this point so much later, it's all instinct to me, built in under the skin, and when those jokes about who would win in a fight with me are so casually thrown around, it's so obvious but not, which is such a strange, strange thing.)

Surrender was illegal. But I failed anyway, in the end, when I left, and moved on with all my dance classes, which left me just as breathless and were perhaps just as sadistic (all the teachers obsessed with ‘good pain’), but missed some quality I’d left behind with the master—and we would have stayed, I think, if not for all the abuse. It was too much of a fear, one wrong move- a foot too far in the front, the side kick a degree too left, the ready stance not solid enough- and the stinging cane, an open palm slap across the face, and I think the day he pulled a child up by both ears into the air until he was kicking and looking desperately out of the upper studio window, it wasn’t enough anymore that he was an Original master, a Korean refugee. And we left before the police came, hid out at the back of the building until the sirens died down, and we made out back to the lot and drove like hell.

I quit dancing for a play, one of the biggest regrets of my life. There is still a heart-twinge when I think about it, something perhaps silly five years later. And after even a couple months of rehearsal, I’d lost the elasticity and the look and the pirouettes and there was no chance I’d be able to push my way back into that world. I quit acting to be a stage manager for a drama, and I took up kickboxing to complement it, but while it was many of the same sharp powermoves, it wasn’t the same, really, and when the instructors were kicked out of that college basement because of lease issues, I felt it, but I moved on, and senior year of highschool I got lost.

When I was a younger fourteen, I wanted so badly to be a boxer. Mum said no, someone would break my nose, I wouldn't be beautiful anymore; Dad said, "Girls don't box." I wanted to feel the bones in my nose break. I wanted those black-eyes, bandaged hands and limps, badass complexion, those straining calf muscles. I would spend hours at the studio and our basement, beating the shit out of all the equipment, until the sweat ran into my eyes and stung.