high-bar baking

There’s a line in The Abyss just before a couple of the characters go out in deep sea spacesuits, the kind that pressurize with oxygenated liquid from the inside. (Is that real, or the 90s sci-fi world’s idea of cool?) The crotchety old man main character says, “You breathed liquid for nine months. Your body will remember.”

I think about that more than any regular person thinks about it. Or probably any abnormal people either. 

I was standing in front of a boxing bag today, taking out a little too much stress on it. More stress than I realized was in my body, actually, but that’s a story for another venue. Instead, I was thinking about how I still remembered. 

I hung up my clothes on March 9th, 2019. It’s been over five years now. I’ve done some Zoom workouts with my old coach (plenty, actually!), I’ve hit a few bags, I’ve tried to teach some kiddos at an after school program. But I haven’t stepped into a ring, not like that, in half a decade. 

My body still remembers. 

I remember (perhaps even better now, after years of yoga!) how to push/pull force up from the ground with my feet. I remember how to snap my hips on every punch. How to breathe out like my body can’t be trusted to breathe in if I don’t force it to (spoiler alert, it can’t). How to stand just the right distance from the bag, a thing I cannot for the life of my impart correctly to these boys. Heck, I don’t know how to impart anything to these boys. 

But it’s all still in me. All that memory. All that myelin. It’s all hiding, waiting to come out.

In a loosely connected transition, this recipe is an old favourite. Everyone loves it, it doesn’t have egg in it (if you leave off the egg wash and just roll the sugar in when you’re forming the logs, which I recommend), and I can do it in my sleep. 

Don’t sleep on shortbread. Or my ability to throw a mean punch, apparently.

Still.