Dancing and the dance

8:46 am Saturday morning.

Bare feet. Blue robe. Ponytail at half-mast. Coffee in my favorite yellow mug. Traffic hush-shusses by – wheel sounds amplified by wet pavement. The forecast calls for days of this, alternating with rain. I’m at home with myself.

“You need some man to take you out dancing,” the man from Baton Rouge tells me. He’s called on Friday night and asked what my plans for the weekend are. I’m going to write, do the laundry, and work on a bracelet I’m making. “That’s what you did last weekend. You wouldn’t be writing if I was there,” he says.

“Yes I would.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

And there it is. He means well but this is the reason why I’m suspicious of dating. Or at least, the bones of the reason. I like to write. I like to make jewelry. I like sitting for hours looking at the sky. My idea of fun might or might not be dancing.

A Neptune in the first house baby, shape-shifting is second nature to me. I have morphed into more personas in my life than I care to count. Wanting to accommodate, or just too damn lazy to hold my ground, I become Ray Bradbury’s Martian from The Martian Chronicles. It happens gradually. I barely notice the things I start doing or stop doing. The subtle little ways in which I push one characteristic into the depths and pull another forward to buy acceptance or peace or praise.

This isn’t just about me. Most of us do it – to further a career, to keep a job, to hold a marriage together, to be accepted in a community.

I’m scared of doing it now. Terrified I might die without ever knowing who I really am. I’d rather take the flak that comes from saying no, from being no.

It helps to spend a lot of time alone, not being pushed or pulled.

I’ve grown comfortable with silence. The idea has sunk in that, as much as I love partnership, I’m unsuited to it as a full-time endeavor.

There are moments when it pays to be a thorn and not a rose. The Scorpio announces to me with a huge grin, “I really like liking you just the way you are.”
The inference is that I’m a pain in the ass. “You criticize me more than any woman I ever knew,” he tells me. He’s laughing, though. I’m laughing too. I pick on him to get a reaction, to try to make him lose his almighty cool – but mostly it’s a prickly kind of affection and gratitude that makes me take pokes at him. It’s that he’s impervious to my barbs and eccentricities. And he doesn’t mind that I’m impervious to his.

That’s my kind of dancing.