It’s dark when we step out of the lodge. The moon is slivering against a partly cloudy sky. I take a breath, and catch the woods around us - trying not to listen in on what Eithne is telling Coal behind me. Something about her brakes? Follow her? I expect I’ll learn.
I’m riding home with Coal, and get the front seat, three other passengers packed into the seat behind me. Coal’s drum sits sideways across my lap. As we move out he tells us that she’s leaking brake fluid- but she’s going to try and drive home anyway. We’re to follow her to - call 911 when she slams into a tree? - I am not sure how she expects us to help.
We pull out behind her. Patient Coal in profound trust - I, worried. Tap tap, my fingers go on the drum. Tap tap.
I had barely talked to her at the lodge - she was after all what I was grieving. Her leaving, her returning, and the pain in both. I have been repelled by the venom in me, the instinctive sarcasm that riles up to crack at any crack where light gets in. My desire to see her hurt, pay, feel what I feel. I do not like myself like this.
Yet tonight as she drives before us without brakes, I find no desire to see her hurt. I find no ill will, only the fierce need to see her safe. Tap tap, I set my strongest magics around her, circling her from harm, my fingers find the drum again. Tap tap.
Tap tap.
Tap tap.
If she’s inside, hiding from the sun in her room . . . I think, as I approach her house, unfinished threats trailing behind. She is inside, but out in the dining room. She sticks her tongue out at me as she sees me, and I return the gesture. I come inside, and she gets up to hug me - pausing so I can set down my bag of stinging nettles, unsling my backpack, and gather her up. We stand in the doorway for a long time.
“You’re making up for a lot of missed hugs.” she tells me, still holding tight. I don’t mind.
I ask if she’s hungry and she tells me she just ate breakfast at noon, giggling a little. I bring out my Shepherd's pie and heat up a third of it for myself in her rarely used toaster oven, and sit beside her at the table. She’s making a playlist for the dance tonight.
We sit with legs pressed casually against each other, and I sit, mind only half on the conversation, the other bit listening to her through her skin. There is so much warmth in her, no gates or walls to waylay me, only soft acceptance. It’s nice.
Need/want a ride to the fusion thing tonight? She texts me.
I’m eating dinner with Papa. I tell him, and he wants to know if I do. Well yes, this dance is out in Quilcene, the first dance hosted out beyond the bounds of town I’ve seen since I joined this community, the first hope I could host something at my house. I also want to support Pancho and Lisa, they’re newer than I am here, and I like both of them. I should go.
I don’t particularly want to go with Eithne. I don’t want to put myself in a situation where I’m stuck in the car with her if things go south. I don’t want to be stuck there -- but that’s less of an issue since my house is going to be on everyone else’s way home. I can always catch a ride with someone else.
I close my eyes, feel into my body - stomach still tight in its endless knot, not sure if it’s hungry or sick or somewhere inbetween, but I feel stable. I explain all this to Papa and in the explaining make up my mind.
I, yes. If you’re going, I would be open to that.
Her response is almost instantaneous, Really?! Yay!
She tells me she’ll pick me up in about an hour or so. I shave by candle light, and pack my backpack with the things I’ll need. A book in case I need to retreat there. Crocheting to calm my fingers. My computer in case I need to write. Tea goes into my thermos, rose mint to calm my stomach such as I can. Food in case I find out I am hungry.
Packed, I decide to clean my room while I wait. The tangled cords get pulled apart and wound. The clothes sorted and taken down to the laundry. I am cleaning the floor when Eithne’s truck brings in its characteristic rumble. When she knocks I knock back, and the hug is warm. I’m all boundaries but not the sharp kind tonight. It will do I decide.
We’re on our way, whispering past the night strewn farmhouses along highway 104, when she suddenly voices the realization “You’re not going to dance with me are you.”
“No,” I tell her, “I’m not.”
“What if we’re the only ones there?”
“Then I can dance with Lisa and you can have Pancho.”
Her voice gets a little dreamy, “I’m okay with that.” Pancho is a dance teacher, and a beauty to dance with. I laugh. We navigate together - I, remembering the numbers in our directions, and she the intuition, winding our way up a mountain up at the edge of the Olympics. There are glow lights illuminating the path, and signs guiding us to the space to park. When we get there it’s an empty field. Only us.
This is confirmed inside. We’re an hour late and the first guests to arrive. They’ve set everything up beautifully with tealights in alcoves and a big open space cleared for dancing. They’re happy to see us. I grab Lisa right away, and remember how to dance with her for one song, then two - then the rules of social dance insist that she dance with Eithne, and I get Pancho for a song. Then they dance with each other, and I dance by myself. Eithne is sitting watching me. I came here to dance with other people. She offers, I turn her down, reconsider.
“Will you actually follow me?” I ask.
“Yes!” She insists.
“Okay,” I say and take her hand.
I wanted to do this alone in her room to music we could control, without eyes to see. I wanted to build our dance back up from the ground, from the knowledge that we are both good dancers now, from the sense that I can lead, and she can follow - even if I never ask that of her.
We try now. I insist on her following, and she, hyper alert, follows before I even twitch a finger in directions I didn’t mean to point her - precognitive following - a super power I feel small for denying her, but I just want to see that she can.
She tries, but there’s something basically off. When I dance with her, I listen to her,become a basis from which her dance can spin off of, and we have beautiful dances this way - but now as I try and exert my will, there’s something discordant. I dance trying to discover it, and can’t - go back to Lisa - come back to Eithne several songs later, and try again. It’s on our third dance, near the end, when I’ve tried unsuccessfully yet again to do one of my favorite moves, that I catch it.
She’s dancing to a different rhythm.
Where I’m perhaps skipping every fourth beat, she’s skipping every third, and it’s that jarring discordance that makes this so hard.
I try and shift it, communicate that I want her to slow down into mine, but she won’t, can’t. There’s something fundamentally off about us. Something as deep as the rhythms we dance to. When the dance ends I’m spiraling down into despair of anything ever working between us. We’re just too different. I think. We dance to a different drum beat.
After I’ve eaten my Shepherds pie, Eithne collects paper bags and we head down to the Rosewind Commons to collect Hawthorn berries. We encounter two friends, most recently seen at the lodge, and talk to them a while. They’re eating lunch out of pots in the sun, propped up against his van, turned mobile home. As we depart she calls after us “Enjoy your heart medicine!”
The tree we gathered flowers from two turns of the season ago isn’t quite ripe yet, so we make our way down the field and find one nestled among the rose bushes behind the children’s playhouse. We gather together. The conversation is light. Memories of her time in Seattle, walking out at night, and all the times she’s been catcalled or come onto. I tell her about last year’s Hawthorn fiasco. The pie with little cracked Hawthorn berries crunching between your teeth.
When we’ve picked most of the berries from the lower accessible branches, I set her on my shoulders and let her pick that way for a while. Then, after she’s tried and failed to lift me on hers, I climb up onto the roof of the playhouse, sharply slanted, so that I have to hold the roof line and lean out, stretching one handed for any berries. I tell her I’ll try not to topple on top of her.
“I wouldn’t mind,” she says, looking up the five feet with flirtatious eyes.
Eithne makes her way past the hawthorn spikes into the tree’s branches, and gathers from there, and when I’ve exhausted my roof perch, I make my way up into the tree with her. A woman comes by and asks who we are, and I introduce myself as Mama’s progeny - who of course the stranger knows.
“It’s pretty much my pass anywhere in this town,” I explain to an amazed Eithne.
My bag has gotten fuller than hers, but she’s hungry, so we head back to finish off the Shepherd's pie. On the way back I tell her I have a thing for women who can climb trees.
“I figured,” she says.
“I’ve told you?”
“No, it just seems like the kind of thing Pan would be into.”
We walk back with so much medicine in our hearts.
I’m feeling trapped. I’m going to have to go home with Eithne, and somehow I have to be okay with that, despite this discordance that can never be fixed. I dance with Lisa a dance, trying to forget. Pancho a dance, trying to move through. Then I begin dancing with myself, just trying to get these emotions into some semblance of order. Not this tangled ball of yarn in my chest.
Eithne comes to me, I see her out of my peripheral vision, and hold up a hand in her direction without turning my head at all, warding her away. She gets it, goes and sits down. I keep dancing my dance. She goes and dances with Pancho and I watch as somehow they dance fluidly. I see no hint of this discord between them. It’s just me.Just her.
In a break, she asks me for a safety pin, and I go to my coat to get her one, only to find my safety pin has fallen out unbeknownst to me, who knows how long ago. She needs it to pull the straps on her tanktop together, so I pull out some of my crocheting string, and cut her off a length.
I dance a few more songs, mostly by myself, feeling again the hatred of being the only one on the dance floor, mirrored and overwhelmed now by my revulsion of dancing with her.
Finally after I’ve calmed down enough, I go crouch next to where she’s sitting with the dog.
“Where are you at?”
“In terms of leaving? I’m good for whenever.”
“I’m about ready.”
“Okay.”
We say our goodbyes, and head out to the truck.
“How are you doing?” she says as we head out into the dark.”
“Still quite triggered, but doing better.”
“What?! Why?”
“Dancing with you - do you need me to guide you through this dark patch?”
“No! What about dancing with me?”
“Our inability to dance together.”
“I was trying so hard. If that wasn’t what you wanted, I don’t know what is.”
“It wasn’t at all.”
We reach the truck, get in, she sits there, not starting the engine. Not moving. Finally she speaks.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I needed to take some time for myself, get into a space where I could survive the journey back with you.”
“I don’t want you to just have to survive the journey with me!” Her head goes into her hands. Her whole body slumped. I ask if I can have a contact point and she offers me a hand.
“You really didn’t like dancing with me tonight?”
“No.”
“Okay, now I’m triggered. This is a pattern in my life, men hiding their discomfort, me thinking everything is fine. Only telling me after.”
“Well I felt like you weren’t listening to me,” I interject, “so perhaps we’re not on such a different page.”
She’s silent for a long time. Earlier we had in passing mentioned that basic arithmetic helps get her out of extreme emotional spirals. Half joking, I say “do you need me to give you math problems?”
“No,” she says, voice teary, then “Yes”
“ 8X8?”
“58?”
“Close.”
“72”
“Too far.”
“60?”
“Better.”
“64!”
“There we go 17+5?”
Oddly the math calms me too. I thrill a little in the way I always have the answer before her. My brain wouldn't have been able to do that before, but even unoiled, it knows these pathways now. I teach her how to multiply larger numbers 17x5 = 7X5 + 10X5. It pulls the both of us out. Finally after we’ve both found sufficient stability, and the inside of the truck is completely fogged in because we’ve been sitting for so long, we begin the long drive home.
“Are you ready to try dancing again?” I ask her. She’s wary, as you might expect after last time, but I’m confident. Here I have time and space to communicate. Here we can use words.
I have her put on something slow with a good solid beat, and show her how I show my follows the beat I’m dancing to - with the movements in my wrist.
“I don’t get that, I can’t understand that from there, that’s why I just always ignore it.”
“Okay, but now you know what it means, can you try listening to it?”
“No, that just doesn’t work for me.”
“What would you do to convey rhythm?”
“I wouldn’t, I’d let my partner set whatever rhythm they want, it’s not that important.”
“It IS that important.”
“It’s not that important to me.”
“Do you want to dance with me?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s find a way you can listen to my rhythm.”
We find that moving her whole arm works, but it’s a lot of work for something I feel should be inherent in the connection. It’s fine when our whole bodies are pressed against each other, but she sucks at reading me through her arms.
I show her a few moves I like to do she’s never been able to let me do, and she learns them quickly enough. She doesn’t particularly like them. She keeps trying to dance close and I keep pushing her away. I -will- figure out how to do this.
“What about if you put your hand on my chest, like this?”
“No.”
“What?”
“No, I hate that, I won’t do it.”
“That’s okay. If you don’t like doing it we won’t do it when we dance, but right now I’m trying to test underlying rhythms and how we can sync them, and I want to test this.”
“So I don’t get a choice?”
“Of course you get a choice, you always get a choice, but I would REALLY appreciate it if you’d cooperate.”
“It feels like a power play - I won’t.”
“Fine, how about my hand on your chest?”
“That’s fine.”
Damnit, that isn’t what I wanted to test at all. I find that I want to connect her through her arms to the source of my rhythm, hand to heart can we dance at the same beat?
I show her how frustrating it is to dance with someone who’s not dancing to your rhythm, but she doesn’t seem especially frustrated, just warm and wanting to dance close. Finally I give up and dance her close, noticing how well this works and wondering if we can ever have this at arms reach. Chest on chest, groin against leg, we dance. I get hard, she starts to melt, and when the second slow song is over I go and sit down and check my computer, and then suggest we go pick raspberries. As we go out into the patch she turns to me and says
“Who are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Dance me like that, and then go check your computer . . . Who are you?”
She’s hungry when we get home from Quilcene, but declines my invitation in. It wasn’t a bad drive considering. She told me stories about all the shameful things she’s done for love, the desperate moments, and it’s humanizing. This is the girl who ran a quarter mile in bare feet in the snow to go see the boy she loved, and got caught because of the prints in the morning.
She lets me out, gets out and hugs me goodbye as is her custom, and this hug lingers as long as I will allow it to. Despite it all it still feels good to hold her close.
Then I come inside and she drives away. I go put my backpack away, turn on my phone’s flashlight to find my glasses case, lean it against the statue of Quan Yin on my altar, and get undressed. When I go to grab my phone, and turn off the light I see the statue glowing on one side. I had forgotten she was glow in the dark.
I take my light and shine it on all sides, alternating around her, and then turning the light off. She’s glowing most brightly on the side I just lit, and I try again. The front gets the last light this time, and when I turn off the light she radiates symmetrically.
Goddess of compassion. She stands on a dragon, dripping the panicea she carries into its mouth as it writhes beneath her. She is kindness personified - not the false kindness that might let the dragon overwhelm her, bear it on her back - but the true kindness that lets everything fall into place, and acts with benevolence on that order.
I think of Eithne then. The kindness of offering to take me. The compassion in her desire that the drive back be more than bearable. Even as I feel the need to remind her she is a goddess above the dragon, and not to stoop herself in order to try and raise him - she embodies so much of this.
Where am I in this picture? I see then the horns of the god I’ve set behind the goddess. Standing at her back, ever present in the picture, containing her compassion, her dragon, in arms of bone. He is not there because she needs him, but because he knows her value. He supports without weakening, holds without crushing, protects without smothering.
He is at the same time the container which the dragon lashes against, and beyond that, too entrenched in the pattern of things to be called into question. He is man to her woman.
And it is now, only now, that I feel I have abandoned my post. It is I who have questioned the unquestionable. It is I who have forgotten what must always be remembered.
That we are stronger together, a heartbeat is not one, but two.
A lot has changed. I’m dancing in Soul Motion, playing with my shadow. What do you think body?
I would like to be inside of her as soon as possible.
Genitalia you do not speak for body. What about you fingers?
I want to trace her skin
Breath?
I like to blow along her inner thighs . . .
Yes, yes - what about you heart?
Rhythm . . . heart begins, then the music changes.
Boom, boom. The drum beat pounds. Boom, boom.
A voice speaks from the speakers.
“This is not my rhythm. This, is the heart’s rhythm.”
Boom, boom.
Boom, boom.
“This rhythm is old, older than man, older than the drum. There is nothing to do with this rhythm, but trust.”
Boom, boom.
Boom, boom.
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