There was a certain freedom to it – being in the girls’ gym. You might think freedom a strange word for this windowless box in the basement of Central Junior High. But certainly there were no pressures to impress.
We cycled through the normal courses. Basketball. Volleyball. A simple change with a new set of balls. But when it came time for the gymnastics week, the whole pink gymnasium was transformed. Beams and mats. Horses and Bars. Certainly we should have been padded on knees and elbows. At the very least helmeted, gauging our limited expertise. Yet, we flung ourselves without knowledge or permission in unwashed gym shorts and t-shirts for the allotted 50 minutes. No guidance. No spotters. No inhibitions.
The floor exercise came with a record player. We were decades ahead of the popular saying, “Dance like no one is watching,” — believe me, no one was. Dropping the needle with a scratch, then racing to the mat, we made “routines” (completely ignoring the definition of routine, because certainly these movements couldn’t be repeated, as we made them up to the music.)
We were never graded. If you could make it up the cement stairs back to the locker room, you passed.
I can feel it sometimes. Hear the turning of the record as the day begins. And I just abandon rule and worry, and move. I get to decide. We get to decide, how to make our freedom. How to fill it. Drop the needle, and simply dance.
We don’t wear gowns in France for visits to the doctor. The windows where modesty must fly out, are left wide open. I keep a mental pile of these things I would have thought to be traumatic, just as a reminder — not unlike the sticky note above my mom’s phone that read, “What haven’t you survived?”
Yesterday, to check my lymph nodes, the doctor asked me to place my hands on her shoulders. She in turn put her hands on mine. Then just under my arms. I’m not sure anyone else heard the music, but I could have been back in Junior High at the gymnasium dance, swaying arms-length apart from last night’s worry of “would he ask me to dance.”
And that’s how we save ourselves, I suppose. Our brains our wired to come running, sticky notes in hand. Some as proof of what we’ve survived. Others just to make us laugh.
Is that why I love the color yellow? Because all of my original thoughts that come dancing on the original yellow pad? Or maybe that’s just another thought to distract me and remind me of all the love around me. I don’t know, but I still hear the music. So I raise my arms on shoulders, in the air, and I keep on dancing.
I don’t suppose the spaces left from loved ones passed can ever be completely filled. But maybe it’s wrong to think they ever were. These relationships weren’t beautiful, memorable, longed for even still, because of their solid perfection. Perhaps they were always stardust, flittering, fluttering, changing shape, with room always left for dancing, beneath the flickering light.
It’s the way I choose to think of it, my mother’s space, not as a hole left behind, but a dance floor. And all that magic that sprinkles from her still, lights up the people around me, and they step in, tap me on the shoulder, and ask me to dance. They are my new daily connections. My new last calls. My shared laughter and secrets. Hopes and challenges. Not replacements, but keepers of the dance.
We’re not all good at the same thing. Some are meant to pull you in, and simply sway. Other’s tap their feet and keep the beat alive. Some dizzy you into laughter. Dance you into breathless. And hold out the ladle of punch. I am grateful for them all. All of you, who keep my dance floor filled, my heart in motion, in sway, in the right tempo, under the stardust.
I’m not sure what it is about flying that seems so appealing. The weightlessness. The freedom. The movement. The view. Maybe it’s everything. We see it from the time we are little. We admire it in living color, given to our heroes as a superpower. We dress up in capes and wings. Pedal bicycles to exhaustion with the hope that just maybe, if we spin our feet fast enough, just this once, we could leave the gravel behind. We race down diving boards and fling ourselves over open water, flapping, lunging, touching the sky. We spin ourselves into circles. We dance. We sing. Perhaps all in this effort, for just a moment, to rise to where we know our hearts have been.
I suppose it’s one of the great reasons for love — this certainty that our arms will give out, our knees will buckle, our feet will ever be dusted in gravel — but oh, how the heart can soar. So we offer it up and out and dare ourselves to follow. The butterflies tickling our fear at first, and releasing themselves to lead the way, we grab the birded wing of love and every childhood dream reveals that it was, is, indeed a superpower, this love that lifts us into the blue.
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again, I don’t know what the day will bring, but one way or another, I am going to fly.
