In dance class on Thursday,

My 30-year-old (doesn’t look it all and has really great tattoos on her feet) classmate danced from the shrine she made of herself (as instructed by the teacher, the shrine making AND the dancing).

Let me make this clear. Probably every single dancer in the modern department is the strong woman type. I mean look at the crazy shit we do. Robot chicken, fetal crawling, finding our ephemeral joints. It’s not beautiful flowwy stuff here. It’s the kind of thing you can do only because you are confident and only because you have already refused to conform to this world’s expectations of you/women (we do have one guy though). 

But when she danced, you could see she was dancing out of herself, but of a self that was already conjoined with another self. I do not know how to make this sound not cliche (trust me, modern dance is not cliche), but she was dancing in/out/with with her lover. A classmate asked her about her dance after class. She has been married for 9 years.  

I always thought that defining yourself by your lover and your love was weak. Strength stems from independence. Independence is mutually exclusive with love via dependence. 

I reflect on my own Yuner-shrine inspired dance of linking, of happy linking with God and food and people, of sad-pulled-many-ways linking with God and people. It’s just me. Andd I thought I was strong but it felt so. Ignoble and trivial in comparison to hers. 

Her piece ended with this: 

I refuse to let you go without a taste of me.

Maybe in 9 years, when I am 30 myself, I will have an inkling of what it means to be strong and in love simultaneously. 

  1. heartyunyun posted this

NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY