All she wants to do is dance, dance.

Thursday night and I’m standing in a brightly-lit aerobics room with approximately 20 other women. We’re waiting for our instructor, Ebony. Three Latina women huddle to the left of me, giggling and speaking Spanish like machine gun rounds. Two lanky, Russian teenagers slouch towards the back of the room whispering to each other. An Asian grandmother stretches her birdlike shoulder blades, raising her stick thin arms above her head. The middle-aged woman to my right stares at a corner of the ceiling and bounces nervously on the balls of her feet. There are more, but these are the ones that make an impression while I stretch my quads, flex my calves, and settle into my body.

Here’s the thing: I love to dance. Unfortunately I’m terrible at it. Like, legitimately bad. There’s some strange misfiring circuitry between my arms and my legs. My lower back gets stiff and achy when I wobble around too long. My go-to move is a half squat with fist pumping; lots of shoulder and arm. My legs are essentially just weight-bearing pillars keeping me upright.

Hips? No. Grinding? Uh, nope. Twerk? Oh, you’re funny.

But for me a dance party is sweaty group therapy. I burrow my way to the center of the dance floor like wiggling through a human meat tunnel. Benefits of The Middle include:

1) Using the proximity of other humans to support yourself in case of tequila.

2) 360 degrees of potential escape routes in case of creeper.

3) People. There are so many people and you don’t have to look at, or talk to them, or even acknowledge they exist. You just throw yourself in there and jump around relatively rhythmically until you can’t remember the stress or celebration that dragged you in.

Rough day at work? Go dancing. Found $5 on the street? Dancing. Just broke up with your girlfriend? Dance it out, bitch. Worried your friends met someone more stylish and funnier than you and you’re destined to die alone? Dance. Just saw your favorite author read an excerpt from his new book and you’re so happy you could implode? Go dancing, get run over by a truck, and have your car towed.

I’ve danced in plenty of embarrassing ways. For example, the night ULOL walked in on me trying to recreate Alex Vega’s Call Your Girlfriend dance video. Or the week KJ and I tried to learn this quirky little number. But for years I’ve stalwartly refused to consider Zumba a legitimate form of exercise.

Stereotypically, Zumba conjures images of middle-aged women who sip green tea and shop at Whole Foods. I imagined stay-at-home mothers with spray tans bouncing around to techno beats, while mentally cataloguing the top 100 uses for hemp milk. I’m not saying I’m opposed to the suburbs, or green tea, or spray tanning! Furthermore none of those things are even related to Zumba. But the idea of choreographed group dancing made me feel silly and uncomfortable.

Fifteen minutes into class we’re sweat-soaked and grinning, applauding after each song. Clapping for each other, clapping for ourselves. Ebony tests our endurance with a song that requires 4 minutes of squat and lunge variations. Afterwards we shake out our screaming legs, smiling. Nodding commiserating nods at each other. The next song starts, the transformation begins. Nervous energy dissipates as this roomful of women take ownership of their bodies. The tango starts slow, 1-2-3-4, out-in-out-in. The beat drops us into double time, the song evolving into a hip hop frankensong mashup. Hips shed rigidity, shimmies come more naturally. We are a room of fluidity, embodying round and full-bodied motion. The Asian grandmother rolls her hips in broad figure eights. The nervous middle-aged woman cocks one hip and pop-pop-pops to the beat. This is a safe space. For 60 minutes, nobody wears their body like an apology.  

I’m not the only one who had a warped perception of Zumba. I told my friend I was starting and she responded “Oh. I think the woman I babysit for does that. Is that a thing people our age do?” The answer: yes. I wish everyone would. Dancing without expectation or reservation, the energy and freedom are intoxicating. Plus, you know. It teaches you to drop it, drop it low on the dance flo’.

Keep it real, kittens.

-b

This is how it happens.

This is how it starts: Friday afternoon, Guinness and cigarettes. The park with grass and sun. The way bodies and gravity interact with wind. This is the before. Eggplant, hummus, caramelized onions. Flex hours and benefits, while Frances sleeps and What time is it? Shit.

This is the house. People I know and people I don’t. A boy with kind eyes. The girls from two years ago. This is one spoonful of each decadence, and a friend saying It’s ok to need help and my head agreeing.

This is how I find myself in a papasan on a friend’s front porch. This is when she calls with The News, and everything starts to feel like breaking. It is still winter and I would be cold if I remembered how to be cold. This is saying Hush baby, go to sleep. Call me in the morning. This is saying It’s going to be ok and almost believing it. 

This is front seat smoking after dirty convenience store light. This is rap music, and bare feet, and her mouth warping around words until we’re laughing again.  

These are the people I call friends. Later they will hold me. I will let them because sometimes that’s what I need, but not yet. Now I will arrange my face so it looks like my face, and dance until the poisons coalesce in the bloodstream. Until the evening knocks me off my feet. This is getting back on my feet. This is saying I have to go.  

This is how I run 15 blocks towards or away from something.

This is the conversation I won’t remember. This is the roommate I met once. This is how I bite off more than I can chew, leave my head sick drone buzzing for days. This is under water for longer than the memory of breathing; this is dressing myself in heavy. This is how I can’t sleep, can’t sleep, can’t sleep but the waking makes the walls wobble.

This is how you lose a day: slowly, slowly, and then all at once.

This is the Walmart parking lot at noon on a Sunday, eating a southwestern chicken wrap. This is what makes a chicken wrap southwestern: chipotle ranch. My phone provides the ambience while I worry vaguely about data usage and rates. In the front seat. Infant caps, infant socks. This is Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? while Stars takes me to the riot and nothing feels real.

This is a room full of women. A safe place for words like “breast pump” and “vaginal tearing”. This is babies in ice cubes and inducing labor. This is three beers later. Raspberry cake, and It’s a boy! Thick yellow icing and discarded wrapping paper. This is bruschetta and exhaustion heavy in the belly.

This is poetry: an empty room and my too loud voice begging you Love me. You, stranger. You, friend. You, soul of my soul. This is tequila in a bloom of orange peel.  

This is how it ends. The not yet but maybe. The stretching into tomorrow. The waking, and waking, and waking of every day. This is how it ends.

-b

Then After the Show its the (After Party)

Hello kittens. Are you all disoriented post-Daylight Savings? I woke up yesterday somewhere around noon after sleeping like a tiny infant child.  Between a hotel party, two bottles of Sweet Red, and a late-night-roommate-living-room dance party I’ve accrued about 12 hours of sleep in the last three days. The resultant high is either severe delirium or the fact that it finally feels like spring outside.

You guys, we made it! Every year I think winter will kill me off, and every year February ends. March always happens. I stop crying on my way to work. My heart loses approximately 35 lbs. and I can breathe again most mornings. I don’t know exactly what I want to say here except that I’m alive and that feels really fucking good.

Ok, let’s talk about things.

Set wrist/view from our hotel room

Friday I was invited to read poetry in a town far away (AKA Corvallis). So we rented a room in Albany, because what better opportunity to party like rock stars? Only without heroine or breaking anything in the hotel room. Because we all know Maria has enough shit to deal with already.

[Note: telling us our housekeeper’s name was a really solid move, Phoenix Inn. We would have been much less reserved if it was you, The Hotel, cleaning up after us. But knowing that a real-life human being would have to scrub the shit out of those carpets? Well-played.]

Poetics Corvallis happens the first Friday of every month at Interzone Café. I was honored to share a reading space with representatives from Calyx Press, a dozen or more open mic performers, and a room of eager/engaged/attractive human beings. I performed two 15 minute sets, and somehow maintained witty, albeit self-deprecating, banter with the crowd.

On the subject of poetry—

          “So do you like, have groupies now?”
          “Ummm, not really. I mean, poetry doesn’t get you laid. It’s more like, ‘Hey girl.
           Wanna come back to my place and talk about my depression issues?’”

All jokes aside, poetry might actually be something I’m good at. Like, there’s potential for me to be famous. Not rich, though. Poets don’t get rich, because too many of us thrive on struggle and friction and darkness. Red wine and intravenous drugs. Ok, maybe not the drugs because that’s dangerous behavior I don’t endorse. What I mean is:

my specialty is living said
a man(who could not earn his bread
because he would not sell his head)

On the subject of needles—

          “You let your friend tattoo you.”
          “Yeah, I mean she sterilized the needle…”
          “….”
          “And she’s a real artist. It’s legit.”
          “….”
          “I probably have Hepatitis C.”
          “Wrong tone of voice there. That probably should have been more serious.”

After returning to the hotel (and promptly being kicked out of the pool for noise complaints), we retired to the hotel room for a night of revelry. Expectations included drinking, laughter, and merriment. Unexpected things? Stealing salt from the kitchen to clean wine stains, talking until after sunrise, and calling a bakery in Baltimore at 4am.

On the subject of foreign cuisine—

          Mo: “Good morning. Hello, yes. Is this Little Italy? We have a very important question.”
          Fancy Stephen: “Am I on a radio show?”
          Mo: “No, we are just seven girls in a hotel room in Oregon.
                  We need to know the difference between Italian and French baguettes.”

Apparently it has something to do with elasticity. Straight from the source.

When the bloom made our heads heavy we sprawled across the bed and clasped hands to keep moored during the ebb and flow of memories. Tell me about your first. Tell me about your last. Who would you be if you were a movie? If you were a character? What are your symbols, and what do they mean? To who?

On building relationships—
    “You’re really good at deflecting.”
  “What do you mean?”
  “Case in point.”

But I kissed her bare ankle, and we tucked ourselves into sunrise anyhow. An hour later, everything still the same but somehow Before and After. Stumbling sticky-eyed heavy down to the pool. Saying goodbye in the cold hallway. On the drive home I nearly killed a heron crossing the interstate. It glided into the median; posed as I passed by, stretching its wings and neck. Or maybe that’s the dream. A crazy story told by crazy people should only make you wonder. I don’t know where the truth ends and the metaphor begins, but I think that’s where I live.

And now it’s three days later. I’m lying in my bed. A pile of laundry is glaring at me from the middle of the room. That Cat has finally stopped putting toys into my roommate’s shoes. I am so full with the people in my life it makes me ache in the softest places. I am breathless with anticipation; this season of giddy. You guys. Spring. We made it, and I am so glad you’re all here with me still.

All my love.

-b

A Brief & Incomplete List: #2

47 days of e-mail correspondence:

1) If we moved South, couldn't we just do away with clothes entirely? Why even maintain the illusion of clothes? I wear the exact same thing for 40 hours a week, and it makes me feel like a droid. Or a cartoon. Some sort of caricature of a real human. You should see how long it takes for anybody to say something. Like, how much freedom will social constraints allow you re: wardrobe?

2) This morning I got to play with seven labradoodle puppies! They smelled so bad, and pooped everywhere, but they're so cute! I wish I could keep one in a puppy bjorn all day long, and squeeze it when I needed to. Like a stress ball of adorable.

This is not that monster.

3) I feel like mental flow and theories of time should go hand-in-hand. If I added a chapter to Einstein's Dreams it would talk about the quality of time when you are enjoying your life versus when you aren't. People would do everything they could to avoid being bored because you could get caught in an unhappy task forever. But happy, actively engaged people would die sooner because time would be accelerated. Would you rather die faster happy, or live longer in an unhappiness? You could live forever if you were miserable enough.

4) I was so grumpy, and trying so hard not to be grumpy… So I drew her a monster and said "This is how it makes me feel when you don't honor our plans or respect my time. Now we're done with this conversation"… I personally think it was a pretty cute monster. If you ever piss me off you can have one of your very own!

[Note: this is a surprisingly effective coping mechanism! Highly recommended. Caricatures of your rage can be adorable.]

5) Here's a funny thing: I downloaded the OK Cupid app for my phone, and didn't realize that when you are flipping through profiles if you flick to the left you "Pass" on them and if you flip to the right you "Like" them (and they get a notification). I maybe unintentionally Liked every other person, because I was flicking left/right/left/right without processing.

Neither is this one.

6) Yesterday I watched 10 episodes of Walking Dead in my bed, and one episode of Girls at Ashleigh's house. Getting rid of Netflix doesn't seem to have solved my productivity problems.

7) Sorry, my brain is molasses. I feel like I'm having a fever dream writing this and listening to the Sucker Punch soundtrack. This is what five days of heavy drinking looks like. I know you feel like shit, kid. But get it together! You'll be ok. I promise.

8) I'm trying to be a person that speaks French, and does Zumba, and eats vegan food but I think in my soul I still drink red wine and cry on the drive to work.

[Note: the red wine and driving are not happening at the same time, so don't worry mom!]

9) To: you. From: The Universe. Because I love you.

10) Yessssss. That is all.

Xoxo

     -b

This is THAT monster