Sweet Potato Haircut

Tucked away in the unreferenced sectors of my memory I see them, those big, beautiful, hauntingly familiar studios with high, raftered ceilings. I remember when a bird got stuck inside and chirped from the old wooden beams, and I wanted to do nothing but watch so I messed up every step and didn’t care. I remember the big old windows where I’d get lost, longingly, watching the sun set over the city. I forget how thin I was; I remember how fat and out of place I felt. I made art with my body, though sometimes it was the stodgy art of ancient pink footed monsters who were wracked with conviction that the ultimate beauty is pain in impenetrable disguise. My pain has always been unsatisfied with being disguised– instead she splays all over my face and in every curve and creak of my resistant body. But there were other kinds of art, the embodied movement of my heartache and my joy, of my visceral understanding of the song and its jumbled E minor and G chords. That was the best kind. I think of Rumi and his whirling dervishes– of dance as a way to reach God, spinning into your own communication with divinity, surrendering to the science of movement and the rhythmic tides that swell and crest and you are all tingling sensation and listening. Listening and hearing and channeling something from beyond your consciousness, something that moves through you: you, the vessel of light. I remember moments like that. I can feel mimicry sensations when I imagine it– it warrants more time spent dancing, and wildly.