By week three, I could enter a coffee shop and let my gaze rest on a younger man without looking like I was calculating his grocery bill. It was a soft power. A slow-blooming confidence.
The last class was held in a rooftop bar. Soft jazz. String lights. A dozen women in their forties and fifties, each one glowing with a strange, unapologetic joy.
The instructor was a woman named Simone. She was fifty-two, wore a leather blazer, and had the posture of a woman who had never apologized for taking up space. The class was held in a converted warehouse that smelled of matcha and ambition.
I laughed out loud. Then I enrolled.
We talked for twenty minutes. He was a marine biologist studying sea grass. He called me "insightful." I floated home.
