She wanted to heal someone—anyone—but she also needed to eat, so she started teaching yoga. She made simple flyers advertising “Beach Yoga with Poppy.” She distributed them to the resort concierges, and stapled them to the bulletin board at Ted’s Bakery, and on every lamppost and palm tree she could find.

Rain, sun, cold, or impending hurricane, she was there on Sunset Beach with her portable sack of mats and blocks. She had a battery-operated boom box that she set on a towel. When her students showed up for class, and there were somehow always students, she’d greet them with her sweet, open smile. She’d watch them congratulate themselves for finding an instructor who looked every bit the vacation yogi they’d expected. They loved her Oakley Big Taco sunglasses, deep tan, muscular limbs, and golden-auburn hair pulled back into braided pigtails that somehow appeared sexy instead of childish.

She’d try to think of something inspiring to say from all she’d learned from her studies and travels, but it all seemed too involved and complicated to communicate to her students in a meaningful way. Instead, she read from a cheesy book of inspirational quotes her friend Monique had given to her when she’d broken her jaw. She tried to quote something that made her seem profound, like “Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river.” She used her best poetry-reading voice, imitating her mother.

No matter what she said, her disciples would always nod in agreement, like she’d thought it up herself. She’d start to explain why a certain pose was important, or she’d explore a Sanskrit saying, but she’d forget the words and the meaning and talk herself into a corner while her students waited expectantly for her to get to the ideas that would help them change their lives.

That’s when she got good at improvising. She’d make up names for poses, like “sitting cow,” and tout health benefits that probably didn’t exist, like “emulsifying the bile” and “pulsing kidneys.” Poppy often forgot where she was in her progression, because she didn’t plan her classes, and her jaw hadn’t healed right, so yoga inversions caused her so much pain that she couldn’t teach unless she was stoned. Her hamstrings, IT band, and shoulders were tight from years of surfing.

She’d look around at all those bodies, sunburned, twisted, and prone, and wonder: Did they just do their right or left side? What apex pose had she told them they were working toward? Crow? Tittibhasana? Did anyone even care? She could tell them to strip naked and hump each other and they’d do it.

Silence is an ocean.

Speech is a river.