Wild Horse

I remember standing quietly watching the pounding bodies in rehearsal.

The school was cold and hollow, but the dancers seemed to be the only place of life and possibility.

When I joined the school I made sure I became part of those rehearsals.

Perhaps I thought it would somehow cancel out the deafening sound of alienation and otherness.

Warmth and sweat of a moving body was instinctual. Survival. Not intellectual.

And it worked for a while. Movement was my home.

But the teacher was mean and stood me up in front of my fellow dancers and humiliated me.

You are fat, you are ugly, you are a ringleader.

Those words stuck. Like bleeding leeches for way too long.

Those words ousted me from my own body and hence from my home.

For long afterwards I lived inside a body with no fire.

A broken spirit. Convinced it was gone forever.

But the embers were there. It took a chance meeting, a hit show and following an instinct to see them burn again.

I now know that nothing can truly extinguish what is eternally there.

It transcends what we think or feel.

It can just seem like it vanishes into the wind like a phantom horse.

I am older now and my body has changed.  I sometimes feel its fragility, that it is no home for the fire that burns within it.

That my spirit brings it close to breaking.

But when I dance, and the tiny hand of my daughter slips into mine as she too flails her body to the music

I sense that the flame passes, from body to body, igniting each one to dance until it can dance no more.

I think it does go on forever.