Priya Sharma signed up for a six-class Reformer Pilates pack at a studio off Atherton Road in April, mostly on the recommendation of a colleague who said it had "changed her whole nervous system." By July, Sharma had upgraded to an unlimited membership, bought a pair of grip socks with a non-slip pattern specific to the brand of machine the studio used, and begun describing her core, unprompted, as "finally waking up."
By September, the studio's $179-a-month unlimited plan had been joined, at home, by an actual Reformer machine, delivered in a box the length of a dining table, which now occupies the space in the Sharma living room previously reserved for a dining table. Her partner has adjusted. Dinner is now eaten from the couch, balanced on laps, while the Reformer sits nearby under a folded towel, taking up exactly the floor space a dining table used to and, by Priya's own admission, now shaping more of the household's evenings than anything else they own.
The studio itself has become the organising principle of her week. She has missed two birthdays, one in Oakleigh and one requiring a twenty-minute drive, both scheduled, she notes with real regret, directly opposite her 6:15am class. She did not miss the class. She has joined a group chat of eleven other regulars who refer to themselves, collectively, as "the 6:15 crew," and who she has seen roughly four hundred times this year and whose last names she does not know.
Asked whether Reformer Pilates had become a substitute for her previous social life, Sharma paused for a long moment on the machine's carriage, mid-stretch, and said that it hadn't, exactly, before conceding that she could no longer remember the last time she had made plans that didn't start with checking the studio's class timetable first.
Her partner, for his part, has started doing the 7am class. Not for the exercise, he says. Just so they still see each other.