Current location:	cube, storming outside
Current mood:	determined
Current music:	Alphaville - Summer in Berlin
Entry tags:	fencing, health

Return to the Salle

Because the Zalitraeq setting was All About the Cheese, the first plotline was about the abduction of the princess and her bodyguard by the evil Sky Wolves, there to be left to languish as decorations with the other women of conquered nations. The angst of Princess Qethryn involved being torn from her country and throne. Naturally, the bodyguard was upset over having failed to protect her charge from harm.

But there was an interesting secondary thread to Mazalaen's angst, and it was all about how she felt while watching her body atrophy from a warrior's physique to something weak and soft. I always thought this particular thread a bit of minor color.

...until I went back to fencing yesterday after a month and a half. Oh, I had good reasons to be away, between my grandmother, my urgent job hunt and acclimating to the job I found. But the fact of the matter is that my eating's been erratic, my exercise even more so and I don't even want to discuss my sleep hygiene. I went to the salle directly from work, worried that I would have forgotten everything. I didn't feel rusty, I felt positively immobile. Nicely there were two new students waiting there, convenient witnesses to my embarrassment. I dress, salute and steel myself for the inevitable.

...but I find that the habits are still there. I remember how to maintain my distance. I remember how to parry--I remember more than one kind of parry!--I even remember to riposte, which was always a hit-or-miss thing with me (literally). I remember change-of-line, I remember check-backs and check-forwards and step-lunges. I remember them all well enough that Coach uses my reactions to explain some basic fencing responses to the newbies.

After they've left, though...

"Your balance is gone," Coach says the fourth time I stumble. He doesn't whack me on the helmet for this offense, the way he does when he's playfully correcting me. For once, he's disappointed. "No matter how long you're away, you should always be working on the foot-work. There's no reason not to. You don't need another fencer to do that."

I am more than chastened. I am horrified. That nascent sense of my center-of-self that I worked so hard to develop over the past six months has slipped back out of reach. I spent the rest of the hour trying to find it again, trying to feel my weight-in-motion. I know where I am in space, but I can no longer control it.

On the way home in the car, I suddenly think of Mazalaen. Not so small a thing, that loss of body discipline. It can be remedied, of course... but oh, that moment of realization, when you see the width of the gulf between what you were and where you've coasted to a halt.

I have work to do.

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