You, my dear, are quite the dancer.
The jaunty walk you do down the steps each morning is not a dance everyone can do (even that one time when you fell—OOPS). You dance as you slide grace-ishly in and out of your car door, in and out of small-talk traffic. Your dance is as metaphorical as they come. And as literal.
I saw you strike that pose in the kitchen while you poured yourself some applesauce. I saw your arm stretch, as if it knew exactly where it was going. As if (and this is true) it was saying, “you’ve known all along that you’d arrive here.”
No one will know if you go to the bathroom and spell out a stance or two behind the closed door. Replace one movement with another, like you used to do to stay awake in the black hole that was your first job. Dance by the shitter because no one is watching, like it’s a porcelain disco ball. Dance because you are celebrating without stopping to question. A carnal monologue.
And, before your next flight (when that day, if that day, comes again), you might even get away with a small, slow dance—a last dance with the earth—right there in the LAX bathroom. (Although “getting away” with something at an airport feels against your constitution, even if it only means not being spotted, squatting and shimmying through the slits of a stall door). And then, when you ascend, when the seatbelt sign flicks off and it’s safe to move about the cabin, shuffle down the rows to find yourself, again, in the embrace of an airplane lavatory.
Dance, there too, your first dance as the wife of this particular sky.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, do that weird dance you do in the kitchen (you know the one), and imagine how you must look to your neighbors who can definitely see you.
Go ahead and dance