It's curious as I'm exploring Rose to consider the waves dancing through me, of energy, emotion, sensation, thought. She's tripping my own wires, and maybe I'm tripping hers as well, doing a service, as he says, of assisting a form in dissolving, along with the dissolution of all that's been held there, for so long. One classmate spoke of how she wondered at the frustration that was arising in her the day prior--is this a feeling that the woman on the table carried with her in the flesh? Was this how others reacted to her? So. Many. Layers.
I still feel raw, but today the rawness has less of an edge and more of a softness. Fitting, considering the task today is to begin to peel away the deep fascia from the muscle fibers below, which are nothing if not soft. The muscle has very little integrity of its own. It's like all that we love and admire about muscles in terms of shape and tone and attachment isn't present in the muscle layer itself; it's in the deep fascia. I start on her belly, picking up the fascia with the tip of my hemostat to allow space to enter between the layers, and "cutting air" with the tip of my new scalpel to remove the film without nicking the red fibers, as much as that's possible. There's no rushing it if I want to keep anything intact, and even though it's tedious like creating the skin, it's a whole different ballgame for me. Her belly is totally sucking me in, feeling how the relationship between the deep fascia of the abdomen and rectus abdominus literally melts as I swipe my finger through most of it, and how it requires more from my scalpel when I reach the septas, the natural, fascial lines that might have allowed Rose to have a six-pack in her prime.
The momentum continues and continues and continues, and I start noticing my neck aching for the first time, realizing I've been so laser-focused that my head and upper extremities have essentially been locked in the same position all day long. The linebacker on the table across the room has a drug pump in his abdomen, and its alarm is still going off to be refilled; his team is using it as a reminder to stretch, and I start to take the cue myself. It's sweet and comical at the same time, and I've nearly lost a sense of whether outsiders would consider that fucked up or not. But this attention to detail and focus can't be maintained indefinitely, and I hit a wall about half an hour before the end of the day. Everything feels fuzzy and spacey and I check out into the hall, cooked.
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| Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Katherine Linden, 2010 |
I had told Joe that I'd go with him to contact improv this evening in the Mission, and I don't know if I have the energy, but with a few words of encouragement I commit. State change. I haven't danced in months, and I tell myself stories of how it will go based on how it's gone before. And all that falls apart when the first dance is with a man whose every contact feels like home. Every touch I could fall into forever, and every shift of weight brings a deep rest, rest, resting into the dance. It blows my mind that vulnerability and intimacy can be found so easily, when some of us spend a lifetime trying to chase it down. It's right here, all the time, with whomever and whatever is in front of us. It's screaming at us you're home, you're home, you're already home. Lifting, sliding, rolling, leaning, it's in the other dances I share and in the dances I watch once my energy peters out once again, and Joe and Nathania join me against the wall, leaning in to rest on each other before heading back to rest in our beds. And at the hotel, I'm home. The shitty wi-fi and the dripping bathroom faucet and the cathedral ceilings and the chocolate mints in my fridge and Rose, across the way in the lab, are all home. It's all life, dancing.
