The Power of Stop
Today my gut has the power of stop. She stops me from continuing relationships and making moves in the wrong direction. And when I say stop I don’t mean that she convinces me kindly to cease my potentially harmful actions but she grabs my body and stops its movement.
I could not physically get on a plane to go see the boyfriend I had removed myself from far before I had given him the breakup words. I don’t mean that I did not want to go see him. The easy part of me did want to board the plane and fly the 3 air hours between him and me but I knew my body would not go there.
My hands would not work to pack my bags, my foot would not hit the gas to drive my car to the airport, and my eyes could not search for my boarding pass among 1,000 other emails.
When the easy parts of me want to take over when they want to live with such little joyful intensity she stops them. My gut becomes the opposite of easy. She becomes steadfast and dangerous and all of the things I hope to be someday.
She shouts deeply, loud like the scratches of the tiny grasshopper that flew into my ear when I was a kid. The words of my gut scratch against my eardrum in this same way.
My gut has not always had my ear or the power of stop but the power of drag. You know how the self-defense videos tell you that if you are ever being abducted, or is it taken, abducted seems to be a term used for the disappearance of children and there is nothing childlike about my gut. If you are ever being taken in the way my guttural senses have been you should turn your body into dead weight, the active kind, the heavy kind, the dragging, and kicking kind.
My gut had perfected her role as active dead wait. No matter how hard I tried to force her into the trunk of my car she did not go. She braced her feet sturdily against the asphalt of my driveway and demanded to stay in place.
Occasionally when I would overpower my gut and break her stance, she would fall forward with short choppy lurches.
My gut was mostly unmovable during the last-minute job interview I took a month before I moved to India. She had not yet embraced her power of stop for if she would have I would have not accepted the incoming call of a potential boss. Instead, I accepted the call and listened to the voices in my life that said my move to India was a bad bet.
I forced my gut to move into the conversation with the woman on the other end of the line but not without falling movements, bloody knees, and scraped palms.
She used her power to take my words and give me life. Well, unfortunately, she didn’t take all of my words. She left a pile of bullshit nonsensical ones for me to sift through in hopes to find logical responses to the answers to the interview questions.
Every time my gut offered up I don’t know as a response to the questions she was saving me. She was saving the period of my life that I would spend living in India and feeling brave for the very first time.
But after the interview ended and I stopped trying to force my gut into the small space I wanted to store her in for eternity she gave me my words back and we agreed that I could take those words to India.
On one condition though, I was never allowed to try to force her into the trunk of my car again.