Feeling: liquid
Listening to: a constant A-flat, like Schumann before he went mad
Reading/Watching: The L Word, season 5

Went dancing tonight. On a school night, because I am oh-so-daring. A few co-workers had been planning it for weeks; one last decompression shindig just before the holidays.

Drinks were $0.75, so of course I partook. $1.50 later, I was dancing in the middle of a Thursday night floor, watching the people around me and thinking about how graceful they looked, how effortless they made it seem and how I wished I could do that. Girls in strapless dresses and stiletto heels, swiveling like pole dancers and looking around to see who was watching. I, in my comparatively frumpy jeans and v-neck shirt, was one of those middle-aged women who goes out for 80s night to convince herself she still has "it."

Determined, I stepped back to the bar and paid another seventy-five cents.

And this time, the music swept up and something in me unlocked. My eyes closed, everything in my body opened, and I stopped caring. Stopped caring how I looked, what people thought, what was playing, who was watching, whether I might trip, who I might bump into, how much unseemly, unfeminine room I might take up if I let myself move outside the two-foot square I allowed myself. I was arms legs feet hands hair swingbeatmotion. It flew, it flowed, it caught me up and let me go simultaneously.

I was alive. For the first time in months, everything in me was alive. Not tired, not lonely, not weeping or wishing or aching or anxious. All liquid, all careless, and completely, utterly alive.

I wish you could have been there. I wish you could have joined me. We would have burned a few hundred calories and frizzled through a few auditory nerves, but when I left with ringing ears and smoky hair, every muscle and bone in my body was liquid and swaying. I let my arms swing from the shoulders, and my hips pendulum like an actress from the 1940s.

Not that it matters, but once I let go and just enjoyed the ecstasy of motion, once I stopped worrying how I looked, the tech teacher leaned over and yelled into my ear "You're fricking hot out there."

So there you go. Being careless and spastic is officially hot. And it feels great.

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