Glute Bridges, Alone

On TikTok there's a trend where young people celebrating their 21st birthday during quarantine recreate the experience of going to a bar for the first time while staying at home. Their mom or dad stands at the door of a garage or basement and asks to see their ID, before waving them inside where the lights are low and the music is loud, and another parent or sibling is playing the part of bartender.  

My husband and I have a running joke, similar to this. Since we aren't able to loiter at a cafe on a weekend afternoon like we used to, we try to approximate the experience at home by raising the blinds and lifting open the two narrow, north-facing windows of our apartment, and sitting on the floor while drinking our coffee. By sitting on the floor we're able to look up and see more of the sky, and once we've pushed the coffee table into the kitchen to make space, the living room feels completely changed. We call this "Cafe Floor." 

There are other versions of this joke too: singing John Denver songs on the couch while clutching a Dwight bobblehead (him) and Virgin Mary statuette (me) to our mouths, is our version of a Saturday night karaoke bar experience. Making my husband "call me" to schedule an appointment for a haircut before I agree to pull out the kitchen scissors, has now replaced his regular barbershop visits. And so on. 

These creative re-imaginings of our isolated existence—our “seclusion-delusions” if you will—have been necessary to staying sane while trapped indoors. Our tiny, five hundred square foot apartment is suddenly expanded to the whole length of the city and we can do whatever we want and pretend that life is continuing as usual.

Eventually, the time had come to "go to the gym." My at-home fitness regimen had severely deteriorated over the last few weeks of social distancing: I had gone from wanting to learn to do the splits (a goal that I abandoned almost immediately), to deciding to just do a little yoga everyday, to trying to simply remember to stand with some regularity. 

While procrastinating on an assignment, I decided I would shake the cobwebs loose, fire up a playlist and get my blood pumping. I did some stretches and some bodyweight exercises and then rifled through my kitchen and found my KitchenAid mixer, a bridal shower gift I'd gotten the year before, and held it at my chest while I squatted.

Standing there while Nicki Minaj's "Megatron" blared through Spotify, looking forlornly out the window, I became suddenly emotional, remembering what it was like to stretch out somewhere, clang around with some weights, and then walk home buzzing and wobbly-legged. Doing glute bridges on the yoga mat by myself felt even more ridiculous than it did when I would do the same exercise at the gym, accidentally making eye contact with a passerby as I balanced on my heels and clenched. 

I had revealed my own scam to myself: this was not the gym. In a gym, lifting and clenching is what you are meant to do. Here, on the cramped floor space that could barely accommodate the full length of my yoga mat, dust bunnies from under the couch floating past from the gusts I created with each leg lift, I felt ridiculous and frustrated. 

After three sets of fifteen reps I felt a little better. The next day I was satisfyingly sore in my legs and arms. The day after that I did it all again.