We Are The Dance

I dance.

In dancing, I meet the sticky, unloved parts that arise to snag my ankles from the sharp stones of my heart's road. I greet the familiar faces of my arrogance and judgement and hubris, and grimace at the shadows of my shame. I meet my generosity and willingness, inertia and hopelessness. I marvel at the strength in this body, this incredible vessel, that gives itself so completely to the dance, again and again. So much energy electrifies this body; how can I be so lucky to be granted such a wonderful tool?

I gather these fragments into the small circle of my arms, legs, hips, feet and spine. I give them a shape, and another, and another, and somewhere in the awkward self consciousness of this the shapes start to merge and blend and weave and stomp and soar and float and glide until I am dancing not to be seen but because there is simply nothing else in the whole goddamned universe. And then I disappear into the space between breaths, into the dazzling darkness, and emerge as something other, something entire and small and mundane and magnificent. I am a pebble dropped into a still forest pool, turning endlessly over; end over end over end. There is no bottom, no up or down, this is the vast emptiness of space as I fall through the eternal heart of an ancient star.

And from here, just when I am so breathlessly, reverently found in the stillness, Grief claims me like a lost lover rapping on my door at 2am, loud enough to wake the neighbours. Grief brooks no interference, and declares in a voice of cobwebs and thunder: I am coming in, I am coming through, you will throw open all your doors and windows to me because I am the fiery wind of your deepdark landscape and will not be denied. I will shake your walls with my sweet-sour breath and track mud all over the floor of your heart. Together we will roll in the dirt of my passion and pain and you will feel, my love, you will feel it all, because I am Life coming to claim you, again.

Just when I think I will never cry another tear for her, I dance, and I move, and Grief suddenly fills the empty space and I lose her all over again.

All over again.

I have laid her to rest on countless dance floors. I have given her from my heart to the heavens, from my belly to the world, from my eye to the sun. I think I am done, I must be done, but of course I am not, my body remembers the fleshquake of birthing her, the sting of her suckling mouth, the salt scent at the nape of her neck, her starfish hands clapping with glee, joy her default setting, the kid loved everything.

My body remembers her even though my mind struggles to do so; my memories have faded to the brittle brown of dead leaves, and I have to look at photos now to flood her with colour in my mind’s eye.

But my body has its own wisdom, its own time, and it remembers everything. The feel of her back warm and small against my belly, the perfect snicksnug jigsaw of her and I, two forest creatures curled up all triumphant against the night. The sound of her laugh, her head nodding as she chuckled, her voice husky and low, her delight a constant soundtrack. The flow of her dance, anywhere, everywhere, with abandon and grace and an upturned face as she reached her arms to touch music only she could hear. The o-so-solid shape of my love for her, exploding out of me in every moment; it seemed impossible that one human body could contain so much love, where did it fit?

It didn't, of course. It can't, that's the nature of love, it is the size of the whole universe, and is designed to remind us that we are so much more than this fleshy house we call real while Reality cavorts and gambols just beyond the ken of our blind eyes, taunting us to wake the fuck up and come home.

My body longs for her, longs and aches in its brittle bones and bloody brawn. The spaces between my cells are all the emptier without her.

In the dance I feel it all again; feel myself extending out to touch the untouchable, reach the unreachable, kiss the lost part of me that can never be kissed again.

And so I dance, and in the dance I touch myself, press myself against my own hot flesh to convince myself that I am real and she is not. My hands move in patterns, from my heart to the floor, over and over, letting her go. Letting myself let her go. Knowing that every ending is a beginning and every beginning is an ending, from womb to tomb to womb.

How deep is grief? It is a bottomless ocean, and this is the dance also, to know this endlessness and not be overwhelmed by it, but rather to learn to swim like a dolphin through it, to make it my home, to undulate from the deeps to the shallows and to know the fierce joy contained in my well-muscled tail; one swift flick and I break the skin of the sea, defying the siren weight of gravity to roll my sleek and laughing eye toward the sun.

Water and air, tears and blood, fire and rust, earth and mystery; all these things are mine and beneath this she is a part of me as I am of her. I kick with her tail and she lands back into the ocean with my body. We are the dance.
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We can never be apart.