Junot Diaz - This Is How You Lose Her

By winter’s end you’ve gotten to know all the morning regulars and there’s even this one girl who inspires in you some hope. You pass each other a couple of times a week and she’s a pleasure to watch, a gazelle really — what economy, what gait, and what an amazing fucking cuerpazo. She has Latin features but your radar has been off a while and she could just as likely be a morena as anything. She always smiles at you as you pass. You consider flopping in front of her — My leg! My leg! — but that seems incredibly cursí. You keep hoping you’ll bump into her around town.

The running is going splendid and then six months in you feel a pain in your right foot. Along the inside arch, a burning that doesn’t subside after a few days’ rest. Soon you’re hobbling even when you’re not running. You drop in on emergency care and the RN pushes with his thumb, watches you writhe, and announces you have plantar fasciitis.

You have no idea what that is. When can I run again?

He gives you a pamphlet. Sometimes it takes a month. Sometimes six months. Sometimes a year. He pauses. Sometimes longer.

That makes you so sad you go home and lie in bed in the dark. You’re afraid. I don’t want to go back down the hole, you tell Elvis. Then don’t, he says. Like a hardhead you keep trying to run but the pain sharpens. Finally, you give up. You put away the shoes. You sleep in. When you see other people hitting the paths, you turn away. You find yourself crying in front of sporting goods stores. Out of nowhere you call the ex, but of course she doesn’t pick up. The fact that she hasn’t changed her number gives you some strange hope, even though you’ve heard she’s dating somebody. Word on the street is that the dude is super good to her.

Elvis encourages you to try yoga, the half-Bikram kind they teach in Central Square. Mad fucking ho’s in there, he says. I’m talking ho’s by the ton. While you’re not exactly feeling the ho’s right now, you don’t want to lose all the conditioning you’ve built up, so you give it a shot. The namaste bullshit you could do without, but you fall into it and soon you’re pulling vinyasas with the best of them. Elvis was certainly right. There are mad ho’s, all with their asses in the air, but none of them catch your eye. One miniature blanquita does try to chat you up. She seems impressed that of all the guys in class you alone never take off your shirt, but you skitter away from her cornpoke grin. What the hell are you going to do with a blanquita?

Bone the shit out of her, Elvis offers.

Bust a nut in her mouth, your boy Darnell seconds.

Give her a chance, Arlenny proposes.

But you don’t do any of it. At the end of the sessions you move away quickly to wipe down your mat and she takes the hint. She doesn’t mess with you again, though sometimes during practice she watches you with longing.

You actually become pretty obsessed with yoga and soon you’re taking your mat with you wherever you go. You no longer have fantasies that the ex will be waiting for you in front of your apartment, though every now and then you still call her and let the phone ring to the in-box.

You finally start work on your eighties apocalypse novel—“finally starting” means you write one paragraph — and in a flush of confidence you start messing with this young morena from the Harvard Law School that you meet at the Enormous Room. She’s half your age, one of those super geniuses who finished undergrad when she was nineteen and is seriously lovely. Elvis and Darnell approve. Aces, they say. Arlenny demurs. She’s really young, no? Yes, she’s really young and you fuck a whole lot and during the act the two of you cling to each other for dear life but afterward you peel away like you’re ashamed of yourselves. Most of the time you suspect she feels sorry for you. She says she likes your mind, but considering that she’s smarter than you, that seems doubtful. What she does appear to like is your body, can’t keep her hands off it. I should get back to ballet, she says while undressing you. Then you’d lose your thick, you note, and she laughs. I know, that’s the dilemma.

It’s all going swell, going marvelous, and then in the middle of a sun salutation you feel a shift in your lower back and pau —it’s like a sudden power failure. You lose all strength, have to lie down. Yes, urges the instructor, rest if you have to. When the class is over you need help from the little whitegirl to rise to your feet. Do you want me to take you somewhere? she asks but you shake your head. The walk back to your apartment is some Bataan-type shit. At the Plough and Stars you fall against a stop sign and call Elvis on your cell.

He arrives in a flash with a hottie in tow. She’s a straight-up Cambridge Cape Verdean. The two of them look like they’ve just been fucking. Who’s that? you ask and he shakes his head. Drags you into emergency care. By the time the doctor appears you’re crabbed over like an old man.

It appears to be a ruptured disc, she announces.

Yay, you say.

You’re in bed for a solid two weeks. Elvis brings you food and sits with you while you eat. He talks about the Cape Verdean girl. She’s got like the perfect pussy, he says. It’s like putting your dick in a hot mango.

You listen for a bit and then you say: Just don’t end up like me.

Elvis grins. Shit, no one could ever end up like you, Yunior. You’re a DR original.

His daughter throws your books onto the floor. You don’t care. Maybe it will encourage her to read, you say.

So now it’s your feet, your back, and your heart. You can’t run, you can’t do yoga. You try riding a bike, thinking you’ll turn into an Armstrong, but it kills your back. So you stick to walking. You do it one hour each morning and one hour each night. There is no rush to the head, no tearing up your lungs, no massive shock to your system, but it’s better than nothing.

A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic. Translation: I got to stop fucking with old dudes. Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He’s even lighter than you but he still looks unquestionably black. He’s also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. They are walking hand in hand and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her. Two seconds later, security approaches you and asks for ID. The next day a whitekid on a bike throws a can of Diet Coke at you.

Classes start and by then the squares on your abdomen have been reabsorbed, like tiny islands in a rising sea of lard. You scan the incoming junior faculty for a possible, but there’s nothing. You watch a lot of TV. Sometimes Elvis joins you since his wife doesn’t allow him to smoke weed in the house. He’s taken up yoga now, having seen what it did for you. Lots of ho’s, too, he says, grinning. You want not to hate him.

What happened to the Cape Verdean girl?

What Cape Verdean girl? he says dryly.

You make little advances. You start doing push-ups and pull-ups and even some of your old yoga moves, but very carefully. You have dinner with a couple of girls. One of them is married and hot for days in the late-thirties Dominican middle-class woman sort of way. You can tell she’s contemplating sleeping with you and the whole time you’re eating your short ribs you feel like you’re on the dock. In Santo Domingo I’d never be able to meet you like this, she says with great generosity. Almost all her conversations start with In Santo Domingo. She’s doing a year at the business school and for how much she gushes about Boston you can tell she misses the DR, would never live anywhere else.

Boston is really racist, you offer by way of orientation.