How to Love a Wolf: I don’t know where to begin #1, September 20, 2020

How to Love a Wolf: I don't know where to begin #1

Tonight Kristina Fluty shared a brief video memory that Facebook sent her, a DIY rehearsal "teaser" from the trio that she, Jeff Hancock and I immersed ourselves in making in late summer and all of fall 2016. We made this work—Love With/out Trembling—and presented it with two other dances at Links Hall in December of that year. When I see the video of my dancing it's as if I've lost my tongue and my tongue has become the dancer on the screen. I am speechless. My tongue is alive. But I've lost it.

I was teaching at Theatre and Dance at Wayne State University in Detroit, and loving it: the students, my colleagues and friends, living across the border in Windsor, my birthplace, with beloved family. I was uprooted, yes, the first of many uprootings in the coming years.

I think we all (me, K, and Jeff) felt we were asking new questions in our dancing and process about body, age, ability, technique/"technique", observers, being seen, and sens/xuality. There was a nascency to those questions then, and also a strand of them going way, way back into all of our pasts, shared and not shared, preverbal. But it felt ok to speak them then (September 2016) with stops and starts, half-utterances, that space of dance that is both ineffable and on the tip of the tongue. There was a lightness to our seriousness that now inspires nostalgia.

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My ears are ringing. I hear an airplane's aerial hum in the distance, dumping its toxic fuel to dissipate in the atmosphere's gracious abundant but limited forgiveness; the underground blurred workings of this old house, the caw and short creekings of cicadas, crickets, and frogs through my mostly-closed windows. A small dark grey cat is curled beside me like animated fibonacci punctuation; a comma in my rage; and tiny hungry sleepy proof of magic and manifestation.

We sit side by side in a room with candles lit just for her, painstakingly, twenty of them lit with short fast-burning matches; in this, the first real living room I've had in years; actually-decorated with candles and salt lamps and carpet that reminds you you have soft feet, and civilized seating covered in soft things. I want this feline fibonacci to know that we take care of ourselves here; that we relish and luxuriate; that we surround ourselves with plush and warm, glowing light on an autumn sunday.

But of course she is reminding me of these things, and I give them to her in reverence and awe.

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I stopped knowing how to love dancing when Trump was elected.

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Is that really the way this comes out, after all this time?

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I've sat down to write about this hundreds of times, even just last night on a blog I started in 2017 called "Starring Miss Ogyny." I've written one post. I got a notification about my first follower the other night, three years later.

Some of this writing is in my dissertation, first drafts or final I'm not sure. "Your life is like one long poem," says Frankie one day this past summer, and they would know. They sat with me hour upon hour in 2018 and 2019, and now again in 2020, culling through writing of a body in trauma, in transformation, in theory-daydream, in joy; a body held stagnant in the news of Brett Kavanaugh as another violent boy, with too much authority, then and now, of my generation; a body never exhaling in the onslaught of #MeToo.

Body, body, body, body.

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A body, sighing short unfulfilling sighs, in front of a screen. Long inhales, waiting, and short exhaling sighs like the puffs of a bellows falling short of the embers.

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It took a few months after the election for my fascia to grab hold and take heed of what had been started in me that fall, what was finished as of that Tuesday in November, and what would and will likely never be. This whole churning process in my deep body Oz had probably started with the Access Hollywood audio, all levers and pulleys held in the suspension of believing that "this" would be it, "this" would take care of it, the scourge not just of Trump but of leeking, toxic, rampant misogyny once and for all.

I remember knowing that nothing would be the same for me the day after the election. (I *have* written a lot about this.) I remember teaching dance classes the following days that week. I remember crying in the parking lot on Cass Avenue in Detroit before going in for my 11am. I remember, starting that week, looking at my phone at 3am, 4am, 5am to check, to make sure that Trump was still as crazy as I thought him to be. Somehow this comforted me then. It doesn't comfort me anymore.

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I will never, ever forget the people, my friends, who said "give him a chance." I will never, ever forget the people, my friends, who bothered to share with me that they *might* actually be better off financially because he was elected. Gay, straight, black, white, all democrats. All Clinton voters. Sigh.

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Y'all I can barely touch the part/s about the dancing. My eyes well up. I am a beautiful dancer, I say, I want to say, I think. The tears come.

I want to hold myself back.

And I feel my fascia take the cue. A perfect sequencing of compounding parts.

It takes months after the election. But I can feel it in the pool, at the Y. I start seeing a massage therapist. I ice my knee more religiously. I can feel it happening, but I pretend that I can work harder and stave it off. I dance harder. I dance more. I walk on a treadmill to music with a beat. I don't move aside when I pass white men on the sidewalk. I sense a making-small as I pass them. Not in me, though. In me I sense a million crossing snakes, tiny, tiny, minuscule articulate snakes, drying, shedding, slithering inside my body and there is no source of moisture enough to turn them into waves, undulations, my creatures of fluid.

~

I'm too tired to grapple with the metaphor of snakes, or to transmute it to the spiral potential I hope for. I'm too exhausted by rage and by the obligation to soften for anyone but me and my fibonacci girl. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ...A perfect sequencing of compounding parts.