Dictionary: Touch

It's hard to capture our movement, the intimacy of the simple motions, of hands in contact with each other. Palms, fingers, backs of hands, wrists touching and shifting, arms crossing and uncrossing without losing contact. Slowly we make our way so that we turn each other around, shift around each other, rolling, spinning, curling. We do not move our hands apart.

The intimacy and artistry of this are overwhelming. Her nail polish has sparkles embedded in it and her hands are a little smaller than mine, but a comfortable fit. They move in bright flashes, shifting, and I can't tell who is leading, or what is leading. Our eyes follow our hands. I follow. Everything continues to grow in emotion and energy as the music continues. We lose awareness of the people around us for a long time.

This is dancing. This is a new definition of as close as you can get to someone.

Ride

I'm sitting, preparing to face a decision I made while hypomanic. This happens to me sometimes when I'm depressed - I'll get anxious and hit a few weeks of sleeplessness and over-energized activity. My body is shaking. It was a good decision, but one I now feel out of control towards. I feel like it wasn't really me who invited my dance teacher over for tea. I'm excited but uncertain. Which me is which? Which has control? I often feel this way in the everyday, coming to life in dreams where I can feel more present in my body than in the hours and hours of waking.

Last night my dreams swirled and rose. The roads turned into rollercoasters and I worried about falling out, about losing my glasses. Why were there loops in the bridges and highways? No straight paths anywhere and I don't know where we were going. I guess that's what a lot of things are like. I remember the sensation of my dream self pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose as I went through a curve, the sensation of pressing down on a rollercoaster car, the bar in the front, as we made a sharp loop, the look of the expanse of road in front of me, appearing to undulate in its curves.

And we continued down it anyway, with all of the risk and daring. This is where I am. I placed myself on a dangerous road and now I'm going to pull it together, head up, and follow the path. It was still a road afterall, and not really a rollercoaster, which means that there will be turn offs and choices and forks. I'm not stuck. There are still plenty of choices.

Choices

I'm up to watch the sun rise lately, sleeping short hours only into early morning, rising at 5 and watching the sky turn light. The day always surprises me.

Not because I don't expect it to come, but simply because the day arrives in a part of the sky that isn't outside my window, but off to the side and back of where I can see. My bit of sky is always darker than the day, but it doesn't mean the sun isn't there, isn't headed that way.

In the late afternoons, the sun glares into my window, bright at 3:30 or so, over the water and low before sunset. It might be leaving, but I get to be there and decide whether to go with it or turn away, close the shades.

Dawn, Dusk, and Liminal Spaces

Trying to learn to appreciate the good without crashing into depression when it is over is a challenge. Joy, so much joy even in the small things, but it pulls itself out from under me with a particular violence. I spent three hours talking and making collages with a friend, but when she left, everything fell apart quietly, without me even noticing. Suddenly I realized I was just sitting on my bed, depressed. But I had been so happy and nothing had made me sad except the process of things changing themselves over.

Change is both the good and the bad. I was somewhere before my friend came over, but I easily transitioned into spending time with her. She came in with the good, brought it with her. But she also left with it and took it away. Why do others have this power.

Sunrises bring in the good, but do sunsets take it away? They are both beautiful, both begin something. All change is a beginning, but they don't all feel like one. How do I learn to hold the light in my hands, learn to see the the beginning? How do I learn to say "what now?" with hope instead of dismay?

Opening

I couldn't see the blue moon last night, the second full moon of the month.

I knew it wouldn't be any different from other full moons, that blue moons that actually look blue are the result of particles and chemicals, not their second appearance in 30 or 31 days. But I know that this moon pulls always at my body and I'm a romantic for natural second chances. Not the kind that come by way of human forgiveness or because they are earned, but the accident of being allowed to try again.

Cycles, everywhere, cycles. The cycles right now of home are not the ones my body runs on. In a few days I return to the cycles of school which will not be the usual, but closer. I always follow the cycles of the moon, listen in to my body and the ocean swaying.

Second chances come and sometimes I miss them. Sometimes I miss myself, the way I was before. Before is a time we can't quite place, only that it is not now. There are befores that I do not miss and ones I yearn for.
Arms - mine when they arched in the curve of a small ballerina, when they wrapped around you in bed, before they were scarred.
Hands - that played the piano, the picked vegetables and shelled peas, traced all of the patterns of fences, beds.
Knees - bruised and scraped from running, banging against trees on the way up.
These are times as well as pieces of self, soft skin and a hard head that did things right with the rules in a way that was defiant in itself. Take me back to this before, before everything was frightening, when everything was bright.

Where is my second chance to try again in the now?