Coming up for air

I got four hours of sleep Saturday night. I went to yoga anyway.

It was Sunday morning, 9:30, the day after Berlin's Pride parade. My first Pride, at thirty-eight. I had gone out, met new people, had a night so wholesome it would disappoint every stereotype, and put myself to bed early enough to make the morning class. Barely.

Larisa was teaching. She runs the studio's front desk on the other days, and when I came through the door she smiled and said my name.

A room where somebody knows your name. You cannot know what that does to a person until you have been new in a country.

Larisa likes birds. The whole class was birds. Flamingo, eagle, crow. We balanced and fell and laughed and balanced again, and somewhere in the middle of it I felt something I had not felt since landing here in June. An inkling of belonging.

There is a word I haven’t said in public, and I am going to write it once.

Bisexual.

I choose that word the way you choose a word in a language you are still learning. Because people understand it, not because it fits. The truth is more like a current in a stream. Attraction, for me, moves between the poles of masculine and feminine, and it has never stopped for good at either one. What decides it is not the gender. It is candor. Eye contact that does not flinch. Touch with attention in it.

That stream is deeper than it looks. I spent a decade in it, and I was not treading water. I dove. Some of what I found down there was for me. Much of it was not, and I had to see it to know the difference. From the surface, it looked like hiding. Below, it was a search.

The knowing came years before the saying. I told myself, then a few rooms at a time, and the widest room last. That is what this is. Saturday was the first Pride parade I ever attended. It was not the first I was ever curious about attending.

So no, this is not exactly a coming out. German has a better word. Auftauchen. To surface, the way a diver rises toward the light, the way you step out of a dark forest into a clearing. I went down curious and I came up certain. I am not coming out. I am coming up for air.

After the parade I walked out of the Tiergarten on a wooded path called the Ahornsteig, onto Lennéstraße, one body among hundreds of thousands. That was 8:17pm. A hundred and one minutes later, the first emergency calls came in. A man had driven a van into the crowd on that same path. A woman died. Twenty-nine people were hurt. My first Pride ended with police telling the crowd to go home, while I was somewhere else, feeling free.

The Tiergarten was a hunting ground once, the animal garden, where electors chased deer through the oaks. German Tier is cousin to the English deer. Years ago I read Erik Larson’s book about Berlin in the thirties, In the Garden of Beasts, and its title circled me all week. The man was twenty-one. Police shot him dead the next evening. The officials call it an Islamist terror attack, and the investigation will say what there is to say. I will keep to what I know: I walked that path, and a hundred and one minutes later he drove down it, and I read the news that night in a quiet apartment in a city that had been dancing.

Sunday morning, the studio opened anyway. So there I was, on the mat with a roomful of others.

I am building a company out loud, alone, under my own name, for the first time.

The safe version of my life sits right there in an alternate universe still visible from here. Somebody would pay me well to run teams and work the machines inside their walls, and for a long time somebody did. Five years in clean energy, moving electrons. Five years in global trade, moving atoms. This third time I am working on the human, how we move our energy, how we move our bodies.

There is no employer now. I am living off savings, and this business has to grow until it pays the bills. Beyond the money, I always kept an emotional safety net. A title, a salary, a story about whose fault it would be if it didn’t work out. Betting on myself in public is its own closet to leave, and I am leaving it in the same season I left the first one. Apparently they were the same closet all along. Hiding is one habit. It does not care what you are hiding.

Today Tala published her first letter. It is called The human rebellion. It is written to the people who run yoga studios, and it says what she is for: rooms where somebody knows your name, and the one thing those rooms can do that the feeds cannot. I am building her with the machines I wrote about last week, using them hard so that more humans can get free of what they are doing to us. I live in that tension on purpose. We surfaced together today, she and I. Same moon.

Near the end of class, Larisa called bird of paradise. Side angle first, half bind. Then the full bind, one leg in the air, on four hours of sleep, held together by an arm behind my own back and a room full of strangers breathing in time.

The Buck Moon is full tonight over the old deer garden. What has been underwater is up.

You have rooms like mine, rooms where somebody knows your name. When yours is ready to hear you, I hope you let it.