apropos of nothing
October 16, 2002
An Old Story
This is a reprint of a letter I wrote months ago. It makes me smile. What can I say, I'm a sentimental fool.
* * *
Not long ago you something was frightening and upsetting you. In working your way through it you asked my why I chose to marry W. I gave you a sincere but dry answer. It was the right answer and true at the time, but had you asked me again the next day my answer would have differed, and differed again the next, and the next and the next. I think that is the nature of the choice. It is fluid, and is changed and refracted by and reflected in the tiniest of our daily thoughts and actions. I find new reasons for that choice everyday, and not simply reasons that I hadn’t considered before, but reasons that are born of our lives together.
This concept of choice and consequence fascinates me. I love that it is temporal, that it is impossible to know all the reasons for my choice or for W’s because the reasons change and grow and flow in time.
A few days ago W and I were going for a late evening walk to smoke what we dearly hope will have been one of our last cigarettes. I got up to put on shoes, find a sweater and keys. W waited impatiently in the hallway, all anxious and go-go-go. The television was on and as I was standing up, it was playing music. Bouncy, boppy, fifties sort of rock and roll. And I felt like dancing.
Now some people can really dance. They are fluid and graceful and inspired, the music seeps into their being and nourishes an expression of their joy in existence. They are a beauty to behold. All that energy and passion, rhythm and grace. I suspect that you may be one of those people. I am not.
So I danced in my living room. With one shoe on and one shoe off. I danced in my loping, locked knees, bouncing way. Out of time with the music, bent over too far forward, head stiff, arms bent and raised like chicken wings. I danced. I felt a scratch in my eye, something foreign lodged there. I raised my hand to my eye, and rubbed and rubbed trying to get whatever it was out of my eye. And I danced, one arm bent like a chicken, knees locked and bouncing out of time, and one hand rubbing my right eye.
Frustrated, W stomped back into the room to collect me, perpetually late, and scattered and behind schedule. He stepped through the door frame, looked up at me, and laughed. The big laugh, the one that rocks from the bottom of his lungs, and shakes his chest.
"What the hell are you doing?"
I answered "I wanted to dance but I got something in my eye". And it seemed like a perfectly reasonable answer to me.
He laughed again, asthma forcing him to wheeze, chest shaking, tears tickling his cheek.
"You are the strangest person I have ever met. And that is why I married you"
Posted by sasha
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