I want to be typing a letter to someone, and yet, instead, I’m just writing—writing to no one, to nowhere…
I’ve been suffering from a headache all day long. I suppose it started earlier, earlier than even the day, as I was woken up at—or was that me who woke—and then… too many stressful hours in waking before the sun rose, and a futile attempt to get back to sleep for two hours. Then. Up. Coffee. Bacon. Smoke. Shower. Tears. Exhaustion. Some slow dancing. Headache continues. Headed to work.
I made it to the train station before the rain started to really fall. Up the stairs, under the awning, and then it came, pitter patter, then pour. I caught the wind in my cardigan, and my cardigan pulled me up with the wind. A slow twitching, my arm, out out in. My right leg perched on the ball of my foot, ankle cocked, out out in. The wind pushing and pulling at my knee like a loosed gate, out out out in.
And on the train, I closed my eyes and tuned into my headphones, and tried to breathe. Then the woman beside me scoffed and tapped me on the knee, “I NEED to get off,” she said, as if I were holding her hostage intentionally. I turned my body aside, swinging my legs into the aisle, pulling my bags close to my body so she could have room to pass. Her annoyance was visible, but I swung back into the seat, and with a lift and swoop, sat myself where she had been, closer to the window. Now I could close my eyes, drown in the music, and soak in the train’s vibrations for a good thirty minutes before having to reconnect with the world.
The world. It was still there thirty minutes later. It was waiting, as I stepped off the train and chose to walk the short distance through a slow rain. I rathered the bit of wetness over unloading my bags and backpack to retrieve my umbrella and stay dry. My head was still hurting and I felt an urgency and hope toward the studio bringing some metaphorical sunshine my way. And it did, in part, keeping me there and working for the better part of the day. However, the paint fumes and construction dust pricked at my skull, and by 3:30pm, I could take it no longer. I’m sure it will be more tolerable on days when I’m not at the beck and call of the heightened senses of a migraine.
I found myself putting on my dark glasses when leaving the building, heading outside into overcast skies and a steady shower of rain. Dark glasses like those of the heroic lover, hiding “the turbulence of his passion: his desires, his distresses; in short, his excesses” (Barthes). I found my way into these dark glasses much as I found my way while in studio through the heroic dancing virtuosos Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The buddy heroes best usurped by the Beguine, the “white lady” who danced Fred back across the floor, facing him now but still not looking at him, her steps reflections of his, and then they were side by side again, swinging into a tap cadenza, their feet and the swirling skirt and the fake stars reflected in the polished floor, in the screens.
As I worked through their movements, slowing the video down, attempting to get the timing, the impossible subtleties of her steps, Eleanor swung into a turn, not looking at Fred, not having to, the turn perfectly matched to his, and they were side by side again, tapping in counterpoint, their hands almost touching. Fred tapped out a ripple, and Eleanor repeated it, and glanced sideways over her shoulder and smiled at him, a smile of awareness and complicity and utter joy. A blue smile, both nostalgic and impudent, utterly complicit in saying “I want you to know that I am hiding something from you… I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings” (Barthes). I want you to know that there’s so much more behind this glimmer of a smile you see now.
Dancing is much a metaphor for loving, dance for love, dancers, lovers, …and to dance a duet with ourselves, or to partner when no one else is around, this is the heroic dance, the dance in which we put ourselves in situations where we cannot control our own bodies for they are being driven by another who is absent, those missed catches, that empty embrace. Our dark glasses can only hide so much, but at least they say we are trying to hide it, even a bit of it, and our blue, the most expensive of colors, both prize and cost. Intimate prize, intimate cost. “Blue says: outrageously and absurdly: I am yours or you are mine! And no other… can judge us” (Berger). We are hero.
Shaded. Dancing. Blue. Hero.
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