I know a girl who dances as easy as breathing.

In learning each dance, finding comfort in the precision of each pose, the clarity of each step, she is her most familiar self. And when the dance is learned, when it is ingrained in the very fibers of her muscles, she becomes larger than herself—a surprise to us and even to herself. She becomes something beyond.

I understand her joy. I find it too, though not in dance. My feet were made to stay firmly on the ground underneath a wooden writing desk. I find true delight there, in the painstaking process of peeling apart words. My mouth works alongside the pen in my hand, lips stretching around each syllable as I commit it onto paper. I tell myself bedtime stories to fall asleep, and I wake with the next chapter on the edge of my tongue. In my bedroom, there is a stack of journals taller than that stack of books I haven’t read, all filled with badly written stories; I relish each one. My mind arches and stretches with each new syntactical puzzle—yet it is not quite the same as dancing.

But to sit for too long in the shadows of a story—long and growing longer—is contrary to our nature. We are creatures of movement, after all. I sit and write and sit and think and sit until my brain begins to feel like soup for want of movement.

It was one late afternoon, just on the cusp of evening, when I realized that it was movement indeed that I lacked. I was on the windowsill in the topmost room of an old church, with a notebook splayed open on my shins. I was looking down upon it with all the hostility and spite I could muster because my mind had tick-tocked to a stop and would think no more. I have found that in a pinch, a walk will do to resolve this sort of mind-block, but not even the most restorative of strolls could save me now. I tried, of course, with the little green book strangled in one fist as I marched through the dusk. It was then that I thought of my friend the dancer, with her leaping and twirling and utter excess of movement.

I know my skills, and I know the limits of those skills. When I was a child, and didn’t know every crease and creak in my body like I do now, I wanted desperately to be a dancer. I did as my shrill old Russian teacher told me to do and worshiped the mirror. I tucked my tummy and pointed my toes and wrangled my gangly limbs into straight lines. I straightened my back and aligned my hips, turned my feet out and bent my knees ever so slowly—agonizingly, exquisitely slowly—and raised my arms at just the same speed so that I looked like a jellyfish swimming up through nectar, expanding and retracting through the syrupy sweet. My chin was pinned up tighter than the bun in my hair and my eyes felt glued open with gel. That old woman called out the next position and each flower-petal French word seemed to curl up and curdle in her mouth. My heart lived in that terrified place in the small divot of my throat.

I was always fazed by the propriety of dance. Each sickle-toe made me ill. I have never danced perfectly, or even very well, in spite of all my most absurd efforts. It’s been nearly ten years since I’ve set foot in a dance lesson. 

Nevertheless, on that day, when my feet were itching for more movement than just walking could give, I decided to try once more. 

Whatever dance is to the heart and body—activity, energy, camaraderie—surely it is more to the soul. Often, my mind wanders to made-up dances. Sometimes these dances are prim and poised with pointed toes. At other times they are bright and fun and born to entertain, meant for a stage filled with jazz hands and a kickline to boot, or else they are wild dances meant for the privacy of a studio late at night with twisting hands and contorting knees. Surely such dances represent the state of the soul. Or perhaps they create it. 

There are dances that open their arms, reaching out towards the audience until every single droopy-eyed father in the crowd is tapping his foot along to the rhythm—and there are dances that hug in on themselves and whisper some terrible sadness that brings a tear to the most stoic eye; dances that drag their feet, dances that sour, dances with big glittering smiles so bright they hurt your eyes.

Then there is the dance I danced that night, when I found myself in the bathroom of the church, deep within the old stone walls of the basement.

Truly, I am no good with that tangle of movements that becomes a dance—not nearly as good as I am with pen and paper—but that in no way lessened my pleasure. Moreover, I was in no hurry. I felt the arch of my back, and it was butter-smooth, sweet and easy to carve with even the dullest of knives. My arms began to kick like tongues, flailing and thrashing through the air. Muscles writhed under my skin like tentacles, like spongy squid legs reaching out to escape boiling water. It was a wild dance, far from the beautiful precision meant for the stage. It was the sort of dance that leaves you alive and alight and covered in sweat.

Then, I was out of the church and on the street in the bright daylight with my eyes closed. It was late fall; the wind might have stung if I were sitting still. I was not. There was a saxophone duet playing in my ears—all brassy and sly—and my every step tapped along to the rhythm. Here and there my fingers would snap, or else wander out on either side of my hips in a strange wavy movement. But mostly, they tapped on my thighs, right then left then right again, making my very skin into the taut head of a drum. What are those hands? What do they signify? Not art, or pride or craft, surely. I’ll call it play. I slid to the right as the music slipped down an octave. This strange movement suited me. The sounds of the street floated up to me with their rushing horns and lockjaw steps. All the while the saxophones played, sliding up and down with their bright tones—sultry and teasing and utterly gay.