54. Rain dance

There was a time when I danced. African and Hispanic bars because I would find there great partners to guide me across the wooden floors. Feet who knew what they were doing, accomplished, an absence of shyness when making decisions. Dancers with the ability to take the lead, understanding what my body could do on music, working with the intelligence movements always require, prepared to sense what a tempo can become for two people accompanying each other.

I would arrive alone in the middle of the night, entering places ideal for the irrelevance of names, and where beauty had to do with weightlessness, the kind of motion capable of transcending the body’s proportions. That’s when you could forget what you were made of, opting for osmosis with sound and cadenza. Your members, your organs no longer in the way, these parts that never seem to find the place where they’re supposed to fit. As if you were always too long, fierce, too tall for yourself. Overflowing your own shape. Ultra-visible, every cell too prominent. Your entire being so obvious, imprisoned in an anatomy of self-evidence.

Dancing to invalidate one’s form. Retaining only series of movements, those of a powerful microscopic atom at the heart of matter. Honed by rhythm. And electricity. Hidden by flawless steps and gestures, the only notions surviving under blinking spotlights, worth staging in the shadowless nightclubs and ballrooms where souls finally reveal their acetate-like dispositions.

Even forgetting about dancing itself, just the blend of mind and instincts, one’s identity transformed into an euphonic reflex, the physical having surrendered its heap to the blurred boundaries of resonance and pulse.

In those late hours, I was well. Not a person anymore. Just the perfect, self-abandoned dancer, never fearing that very instant at the mercy of the Other when control must be unconditionally forsaken. Accepting non-existence to be part of the experience. Such a deep faith. An unreserved course, trusting the ground, and the arms of men.

I danced and danced. Nights and nights. My dancing shoes a miracle. Whirling at the level where words recognize the superfluity of their nature. No conversation can be like a dance. Where eyes too are no longer needed, vision overtaken by insight, dimensions and coordinates included in melodies and their beat. Personalities going missing the time of a song.

Disremembering ideas about myself, that was when I could feel. Believe. Way over the naming of my being.

Above and beyond self-awareness, there was indeed a girl dancing and a drum. The notes and keys for a life. With everything a unique possibility. Accurately contemporary to oneself. Neither dwelling in the past, nor caring for a future. The immaculate feeling of a presence. Not an iota missing from that perception. Dancing with the men who captured that quality, modeling it with duplicity, artfulness. Who made somebody, an unquestioning body, out of me, unguarded, free. Given to them, an animated offering, for the sake of a passage into an immense resounding reality.

I did that for decades. Going out alone. Often lying, pretending to meet friends or relatives. A movie or a dinner. Instead, I would rush inside deepness, finding concealed dance floors housing staunch human fibers and their sweat, to dance pain away. To share a language I could finally air with fluency, a man there to respond and extend the message. To read intentions and reply with substance. All of us seeking significance in the circulation of dancers all around, the flux, together moving in a vein as if its warm red blood. Creating time and rain to render our steps anonymous. The scope of hope. Magnitudes for our movements. All the patterns of our heart’s weather. Unfailing lightning and thunder. And cyclonic winds pivoting on our heels.

So I danced.

Laolao