Matty woke up when some kids came back to the hotel drunk, around two or three in the morning. For a second, she thought they were her own children, her fears realized: they had grown up, and irresponsible, overnight. The jokes she had made with them over the Boom call before they went to bed, warning her 13 year old not to go to any parties without her, transmuted by dream logic into reality. The book she'd been reading to them wrapped in the sheets next to her, where Brian should have been. The room smelled wrong and unfamiliar.
She got up and went to pee, listening to the group of young people laughing through the walls. The smell of weed came through the vents. She looked into the mirror, trying to mentally erase the sags and wrinkles, imagining herself at their age. It didn't work. It had been a different country, literally and metaphorically. A different world. Instead, she saw Jenny, a few years older than she was now, the blunt but striking beauty that had been foreshadowed by her experiments with make-up. Matty had cried when she'd seen her, not understanding why.
Matty didn't miss being young, the heady mix of egoism and insecurity, polar fluctuations between things being the best and the worst, hot and gross, the heavens and hells of hormones. She didn't envy the kids next door when they would have to get up in the morning. Well, maybe a little.
She straightened the covers, rubbing warmth back into her feet, putting some music on that helped her sleep when tinnitus kept ringing her back awake. She ignored the waiting messages, the feed. Your desires are not my own, she thought to the phone, the mantra she had taught herself. You want me to scroll. I want to sleep. She did open the message from Brian, sent an hour or so after the video call. We love you.
"I love you too," she said out loud. The phone probably thought she was talking to it.
The next morning she went to a yoga session hosted by FemDAO, a women-centric and women-led organization she'd been happy to see included in the schedule. It was a short walk, the air surprisingly warm, to the large, pastel-covered studio with mandalas and cut-out copper vines spinning silhouettes out onto the walls.
She was the oldest and largest person there, and the only one not in tight-fitting clothes, but she had a decade more experience than any of the dozen or so others, and handled the "advanced" asanas easily, despite her weight, while others wobbled and fell.
The instructor was a trans woman, who gave overly technical directions mixed with spiritual platitudes. Matty mostly ignored her, like she tried to ignore the camera broadcasting the studio to a Witch channel so people around the world could participate. It was aimed at the instructor, but also at the mirrored wall, so everyone in the class was visible.
When she felt hands on her back during one of the poses, she tensed, but the correction was actually useful. Unlike in some of the other classes she'd been to, the instructor didn't try to force her to do the vinyasa the "normal" way, which didn't work for her body type. Her advice was clinical, but the adjustment made sense, and she could feel the difference once she'd shifted the way her hips were stacked.
"Are you in the hackathon?" the instructor asked her after the class. She always did her shavasanas sitting up, with her eyes closed, and when she opened them, after the music stopped, everyone was gone, and the instructor was smiling at her. She introduced herself as "Dana, she/her", and waited awkwardly after Matty had introduced herself just by her name, unwilling to bring herself to add the pronouns.
"I'm one of the judges," she said, rolling up her mat. "Our company is sponsoring one of the bounties. We do large scale, decentralized incentives for environmental monitoring."
"Oh wow, I would love to connect." Dana held out her lanyard with the cornybuff, the unicorn/buffalo mascot that proved she had paid .1 Truthereum to mint. Matty took out her phone from her purse and scanned the QR code, inscribing their meeting forever on the blockchain.