Sunday is a day off from the A-Z Challenge, but I’m posting Sunday stories to keep up my posting momentum.
Dance. Party.
She could feel the music pulling her towards the spot in the centre of the floor, where the light was.
Her body wanted to be there, her mind disagreed. Her arms longed to be over her head her hips were swaying, her feet weren’t even really touching the floor. She wouldn’t have been surprised to be look down and see that she was actually floating over the ground. The thought itself was disconcerting, her brain didn’t like it. It rebelled against the whole notion of getting into that circle of light. No matter how much her body wanted to be there, her brain was driving this project and it was keeping her firmly in place.
She wondered what it would be like to be one of those people who rushed in, rushed toward that spotlight. That was never her way, she couldn’t even imagine what that would feel like. To have that freedom. To just do without the weighing in beforehand. To leave the questions out of her brain. To silence that chatter in her skull, to just be open. To have her arms spread towards the light, toward the new.
She didn’t work like that. She was in the small steps, the careful ones. She thought that some time she might like to take ballroom dancing, something where the plan was predictable. Where your body would move in the way you expected it to. You’d get the pleasure of the movement without the challenge of the unpredictable, without the uncertainty. Without the feelings that messed everything up, the ideas that popped up, the sweatiness, the wild eyes, muscles throwing your limbs out in all directions. You wouldn’t take up all the space in the spotlight, sure, it wouldn’t be just you. You wouldn’t have to show everything, all your insides spilling out right there for everyone to see, everything you had hidden.
You couldn’t keep any secrets if you were out there with everything on display. People would know how you could move, they might be able to infer things you wouldn’t want them to know. She knew that she didn’t want to pull up other ideas in people’s minds. She didn’t want to take responsibility for that. She didn’t want them walking through her mind, peering in through all the spaces where she kept the details.
She wanted those for herself.