I found it

A revelation in the kind of man I want to be.

I found it.

I’m dancing in the downtown dance co-op. It’s Thursday evening, and I’ve helped set up the space as has become my custom of late. The altar was made on an impulse, no one else there to do it. A single red ribbon emerges from a pot and sidewinds down the tablecloth, splitting it in two.

We’ve been dancing for a bit. The tempo is just starting to pick up. I’ve been struggling, as I so often struggle in the early ages of the dance, to dance slowly as a man, not just as myself. The end goal is to do both. To be fully me, and fully embodied in this masculine form, partaking of both. That would be beautiful.

I struggle, because there are so few men who dance like men. not in this place, and this kind of dance. Days from now I will watch two people partner dancing, switching between polka, tango, and swing. The man’s part here is simple, simpler than perhaps it could be, but male, in the most straightforward way. I should learn those dances.

As usual, as the tempo picks up, I find masculinity more easily. It’s an upward pull in my chest. A fierceness in my shoulders. A thrust of my hips, and the solidity of my stomach. I have created this image of the male. Found it by experimentation - taking images from women and shifting them sideways.

A few men have helped, but not many. I’m not impressed by most men’s dances. I don’t dance with them. I tend not to notice them as much more than the bodies between beautiful dancers - or in the way when they come too close. I forge a circle around myself, that if a man settles into, I take offense, dance becoming a creature of elbows, and hard wardings. I’ll face away from them, moving close as if unnoticing until homophobia forces them to flee.

Sometimes though, I watch men. I watch looking for movements to add to my dance. Pan’s dance. The unique dance that sets me apart from everyone else on this earth. Sometimes when I watch I find the unexpected. I find someone who dances like a man.

---

He enters the dance floor, the tempo is picking up, but he doesn’t follow it. Not yet. He stops and stoops to let the music wash over him. Taking it into his body, knees bent, palms facing outward at his sides.

Then he begins to dance.

And I realize I was wrong. It’s not in the chest, or the shoulders. It’s not in thrust, though it might still be in the stomach. He dances with his ankles, and his knees. He dances with the earth beneath his feet, and his full body in adoration of it. He dances a little hunched over, not prideful, not powerful. Not the rooster I become when I want to be a man.

But this man dances like a man.

As I begin to imitate him. Shamelessly, mirroring him, and taking the slow edge of the beat, to explore with my ankles. I begin to understand his dance. He’s older than me. Probably early to mid thirties. Maybe late twenties looking at his face, but not watching his dance. This dance is an ode to maturity. It says “I am solid and strong. I am calm and contained. I am capable in the world.” This dance doesn’t claim power. Doesn’t claim beauty. It claims the capacity to hold power well. It claims that even as beauty fades, this dance will endure.

“What have I been dancing?”  I wonder. All this time aiming for masculinity have I been embodying a young man’s dance? Male to me claims that it has power. Strength. Control. Masculine says “Come here, for I am fire, and you fair maiden like to play with fire.” Masculine I had thought was a rooster’s crow.

But this dance feels good. I feel less like a child, and more like an adult. This dance doesn’t crash against the world trying to prove it’s power. It accepts the world and lets it crash against the dance. I am reminded of the roosters who made it into age. The kind ones. The calm ones. The crows that weren’t aimed to impress so much as remind. “I’m here if you need me.” “Don’t go too far.”

---

As the dance picks up momentum, so does he. His base of the mature masculine never goes away completely, but underneath I see a little of his soul. Leaping and spinning in the air. Now a beast and now a bird. Nothing male, merely him. I stay in the slower dance, practicing the steps. Losing it, and looking up at him again to try and find that subtle way of moving again. It will take me months to master this dance. It will take me years to become the thing it embodies. I am a young man. I am not mature. I crave power, I don’t yet wield it well.

When he leaves I keep moving as he moved. Drumming it into my body. Not so much the specific movements, as the sense of self he held. This is what I had been missing. I found the masculine in the fast beat long ago. The young man excels at speed. The older masculine does better in the slow solid rhythm of everyday life.

In weeks to come he would come again, and I would echo his dance, making it my own. When he would dance close, I wouldn’t push him away and defend my circle, but rather give him space. This dance was not a dance to dance with men, neither was it a dance that excluded them, this dance accepts them as a piece, and dances on.

And the more I danced his dance, I realized that it was what I had been looking for for so long. It wasn’t a dance of pursuit. Not a young man’s dance of chasing after women, asking and asking again. This was a dance of waiting. Of trust. Of knowledge that if you are mature, and patient, and strong, she will come to you, and she will be right.

---

This morning I woke up, hit by a worry. Sometime in the night my body had decided it didn’t like the try fail cycle of love. I’ve joked before that after two breakups at once on top of finals and being homeless - no break up would ever hurt again, but it’s not true. I know somewhere in my chest that it will hurt, and while I could bear it, it felt meaningless. My old answers of experience, and learning weren’t enough.

I know what my unconscious is working on. I promised myself a summer without women. A summer to heal. I feel healed, mostly, but yesterday I found a red orange maple leaf on the ground. It’s time to start wondering if I’ll have time for courting beside physics. Time to wonder if I, who pull so much from relationship, would be better off without for the year.

And time to wonder if it’s even worth it. I remember worrying that the woman who took my virginity would be “the one” worrying that I’d always wonder what others were like. That worry has been safely set aside. What’s the point then? If I don’t want more experience, why bother? What I’m looking for now is someone who’ll stay with me over the long haul. Make babies with me in seven years or so. Can I really believe anyone I meet in college will be there for that?

No. That’s not a fair or honest request. Neither is it fair to my heart who keeps falling further and faster with each woman I find. Where that middle ground falls I’m not sure.

What got me out of bed this morning was the memory of this dance. This dance that doesn’t seek, but rather pulls maturity towards itself. If I can just keep dancing this dance. Kepp becoming this dance.

Then in seven years I can look back and say -

I found it.