Traveling as a child on the mini yellow bus from the magnet school to the community center was always a breath of anticipation for me. The bus seats were green pleather, splattered with cuts and tears here and there. The backs of the seats stood up so straight they lacked comfort. The bus ride was long, or at least it felt long to my childhood mind. The images that zipped past the windows as we drove around the city were gray walls, dirty brick, littered streets, and crowded sidewalks. It all felt like it was moving too fast for me to grab a hold of it in my mind.
At the community center, I smiled, laughed and romped around, because it gave me a chance to see my friends, to joke with them, to find out new facts, to hear stories, to do arts and crafts, and be out of the apartment for longer hours. We would have short classes to keep us occupied. Between classes we would go to the playground, which was filled with wood chips and seemed to my short body to be built up so high. When my mom was done with work later in the afternoon, she would arrive to pick me up.
My first memory is of that community center.
Inside the memory, the linoleum floors are off-white with gray speckles. It smells like my grandmother’s house would if it were filled with library-worn textbooks. My mother walks me from the center of the room to a seating area. Then, I’m climbing onto a soft, brown fabric arm chair. The fabric has embroidered lines criss-crossing into a pattern of teensy, tiny diamonds spanning the surface of the cushions. I’m so small that I need to use my arms to climb onto the seat. When I get on the chair and turn around, in front of me is a low, wooden coffee table. The surface of it is smooth, but stripped bare of its original wax coating, so that the dark brown varnish is splotched with pale brown in places. My mother tells me to stay put. Beyond the table, across the wide, empty room, is a long, gray formica desk which is tall enough to reach to my mother’s chest, where parents exchange information with the secretaries and administrators of the center. My mother walks over to it and is now facing the secretaries, passing some sort of note to them before we leave for the day. She is dressed all in black, wearing itchy nylon dress pants and a flowing, soft polyester shirt. Her jewelry bedecks her body as she dangles her bracelets, jangles her earrings, and dons the heirloom necklace I will one day inherit—a simple hexagonal diamond in a small lace-like setting. She carries a large, black, pleather purse on her left shoulder. From it papers and pens peak out, folders and other office supplies. I remember that I was thinking how important what she was doing at that desk must be. I was thinking about how sad I was that we were leaving for the day.
There’s a warmness that rushes through my heart now when I think back to that place. There’s a nostalgia that waves over my mind when I reminisce about spending my days with my friends at the center. My breathing slows, my gaze relaxes, my muscles ease their tension.
My confusion comes with the most integral part of the memory: what was I feeling? I don’t remember how fast or slow my heart was beating, or if I was clumsy or moving with precision, or if I was moving quickly or slowly, or if I was shouting or whispering. Maybe I worry so much about what I was feeling because I’m prone to anxiety, like my mother, as hard as I’ve tried to avoid it.
I remember strongly her frequent frantic energy, with sharp motions and grand movements. I remember feeling rushed by her, always raising her voice to get me to move faster, to hurry up, to get going; her messily throwing my things into a bag or shifting them in the car. Looking back now, I see that she was subjected to anxiety and prone to panic attacks. Even now, she rushes around when she’s merely doing something in the kitchen, with nowhere to go and no appointments for the rest of the day. I work hard to move slowly, breathe fully and take things in stride, so as not to mimic my mother.
As an adult, I alternate between feelings of anxiety and the pompousness of inner peace. Sometimes I find myself rushing around and I slow myself down. Sometimes I find myself overthinking something, with my eyebrows furled and my pupils piercing the empty space in front of me. I relax my face and take a deep breath, breathing out with a sigh. Some days my yoga practice is completely devoted, my mind sways easily like a placid lake, and I take everything in stride, nothing makes my eyes widen or my arm muscles clench against my bones. Other days are exactly the opposite—my eyes squint at everything, my teeth grind each other and grind the bones of my jaw, my foot starts tapping as I worry. No matter the day, my face and my words stay calm, I’m am inexplicably self-possessed, because I’ve learned to subdue that anxiety, I’ve learned how to pretend it isn’t there. But it still invades me.
At the end of the day at the community center, my mother would pick me up and I would once again be subjected to that anxiety when I left the sweet reprieve of after-school comfort.