number 38

"you have to love dancing to stick to it. it gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive." -merce cunningham

and this is why I am dancing again. because I need to feel alive. not just a little bit alive but a lot alive, wholly fully electrically alive. the truth is that I have been holding on by the skin of my teeth for a long time now. I don't know any other way, really. and here was this thing, this spectacular missing piece sort of thing and I couldn't see it, couldn't seem to get to it. for so long, it sort of hovered overhead, in that mysterious space where lovely things tend to hover, seemingly impossibly out of reach, forever and ever amen.

eff it, I said. I'm going to class. and I did. in that first five minutes I felt my body melt into the floor, my hips, my thighs, my shoulders, my ankles, my fingertips, my eyelids, my everything. thoughts scattered, head cleared and for once, grief took a number. had to wait in line, just like everything else. for ninety short minutes, I let go of everything. listened to trains come and go outside, contemplated things like breath and weight. moved through that beautiful light-filled space in the clumsiest, loveliest way. reacquainted myself with that very specific vernacular, the one that only modern dance teachers seem to speak. I was home. am home.

number 38 off the list. four classes down, ninety-six to go. or, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, a billion. because if I do nothing else on the list but this, I will have won.