Like Audrey Hepburn unfurling her wings in an intellectual jazz bar in Funny Face , I have been reuniting with my body and mind by making them dance. Quite literally in the case of my body, at my boyfriend’s band practice or to Beyoncé in my car. As for my mind, pirouettes twirl in the form of words and symbols. Reading, writing, creating, listening to music, and observing art all set my soul dancing.
Background photo by flikr user fred_baby
I quit ballet rather suddenly the winter I was 12 years old. I had just graduated to full pointe classes and was at the studio for instruction or rehearsal three days a week. I received new leotards and permission to shave my legs as early Christmas gifts. The whiteblonde leg hair grew through the holes in my black tights and contrasted starkly. Thanks to puberty, my period, braces, circular Harry Potter glasses, and a new resurgence of migraines, my 12th year was crappy enough without the embarrassment of a leg-hair-ballet-tights situation. Luckily my mom was merciful, and I am not as easily embarrassed these days, so you get to hopefully find delight or commiseration in my awkward middle school self.
Dancing these days is much more relaxed – the dancing of a few beers, old friends, and a clear night sky. Or to an afternoon breeze through an open window, no witnesses to my lack of rhythm except the noisy hummingbirds outside. I watch monarch and mourning cloak butterflies in my garden dance, twirling around each other like in water. I twirl myself sometimes, around my nephew, his young friend, and a full shopping cart, trying to wrangle the three irrational beings. The music and din of market conversation is always so loud, the lights so bright, the experience such a dizzying rush that it feels like a dance performance. But we are rewarded at the finish with fruit instead of flowers.
This piece was originally published by Skirt Collective at www.skirtcollective.com.
I recently received a kind e-mail thanking me for this article and requesting more on the subject. While I’m not an expert, I am happy to republish my insights with the hope to help other couples make love work despite distance.
Long distance relationships suck. There, I said it.
Chesapeake Bay
It sucks to check your phone every five minutes. It sucks to spend Saturday with a book while your boyfriend is at a party 3000 miles away. It sucks trying to find someone to see “Gone Girl” with because all of your friends already saw it with their significant others. It sucks to stare at a pixilated face on a screen instead of a flesh and blood, kissable person.
When your partner is hundreds or thousands of miles away every aspect of your relationship is trickier – communication, trust, fights, sex. My boyfriend and I have been battling the distance for the better part of three years. Like many twenty-something’s we are nomads, moving where our jobs, family obligations, or travel adventures carry us.
Unfortunately, despite our efforts, our lives often carry us to different corners of the U.S. During the past three years we have become accidental experts on long distance relationships and the trials they bring. We’ve fought, we’ve lived together, we’ve moved away from each other, we’ve planned, and we’ve been disappointed. We’ve said goodbye and reunited more times and in more places than I can count – in airports, strip malls, the side of the highway, front porches, and urban street corners.
Long distance relationships may bring a fair amount of suckiness, but they also bring wisdom. The lessons I’ve learned about love, live, and myself during these three years (and counting) of distance have been hard won but valuable – not just for my long distance relationship, but for any relationship.
A flash of nostalgia came over me as I picked up the yellow towel on the couch and hung it up. I remembered my nephew flinging it aside last night the moment he got out of the bath, his long hair dripping on his small, cold shoulders. I saw the same image two nights ago when we planted in his garden after his bath. He seems impervious to the cold and intent on getting dirty, too excited to put on a shirt before grabbing his small yellow hoe. We had meant to plant during the afternoon of course, but my sister, his mom, is a self proclaimed hater of the wind and the palm trees in Southern California have been extra vocal this week.
The author and her sister as wee children
My head throbs now when I hold the yellow towel just as it did when I watched his dear shoulders guide the yellow hoe through a path in his garden. I don’t notice too much. It isn’t too bright or loud, and every day I am learning to be calmer and gentler with myself.
I am trying to be patient with my body, giving it the time and space it needs to heal, and making an effort to enjoy every moment spent with my family.
My shoulders were even smaller than my six-year-old-nephew’s are now when I experienced my first migraine attack. I was three years old and just recovering from a nasty bout with the chicken pox when I experienced excruciating nausea and head pain. To this day I remember not wanting to watch Beauty and the Beast because the television hurt my eyes and how that fact scared me. At that period in my life, like so many budding bookworms in the early 90s, it was a serious emergency if I was too sick to watch Belle tell off Gaston.
I Now Pronounce You Diagnosed
Once I vomited (my greatest fear at that young time) the pain subsided a bit and I was able to sleep, but the attacks were not over. I experienced two more in the following weeks which meant a trip to Dr. Dias, my favorite pediatrician, a gentle Indian man with soft hands and incredibly blue eyes.
The author with her sister at age three and a half – the age migraines began
I have heard my mother tell the story of my toddler migraine attacks to several neurologists and doctors over the years, and she always includes this exchange:
Mom: Please don’t tell me she has migraines.
Dr. Dias: I can tell you these aren’t migraines, but they are migraines.
I now pronounce you diagnosed.
I don’t remember much about being three but most of it revolved around the back yard and my little sister and playing in the sprinklers. It’s easy as an adult to conjure up feelings of goodwill, love, and empathy alongside an image your toddler self. When you picture your young self ill or frightened the desire to comfort is strong and natural. But as we get older, thanks to society or nature or both, that desire fades and sacrificing our health for success, money, convenience, the happiness of others, fill-in-the-blank, is the norm. Whether you’re stuck inside with a chronic illness 23 hours a day or just doing what you need to do to make your day a little easier, each of us could benefit from looking in on that young self every once in a while.
Long must you suffer, not knowing what,
Until suddenly, from a piece of fruit hatefully bitten,
The taste of the suffering enters you.
And then you already almost love what you savor. No one
Will talk it out of you again.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Even after a brief stay at elevation the air on the coast feels impossibly thick. The city streets seem too wide, the sky not blue enough, the horizon too far away. It doesn’t take long for the mountains to get under your skin. After only a few hours at elevation your blood thickens and your body produces more red blood cells. You become more efficient at using oxygen so that even this thin air feels more nourishing than her coastal cousin.
I was away less than two weeks this time, but it was long enough for me to reconnect to places and people that I love and miss and also meet and discover new ones. It was long enough for me to feel the freshly melted snow carry my hair downstream. It was long enough to sweat, climb, and bleed in the early summer sun. It was long enough to reawaken muscles and corners of my body and soul that have too long been ignored. It was long enough for me to remember what it feels like to be healthy again.
The Tuolumne River
During the 12 days I spent in the Eastern Sierra I had four migraines. Each of those migraines lasted less than twenty four hours, not including the postdrome stage (also known as the migraine hangover.) To some this may seem like a lot, but compared to the baseline of daily, constant migraine that was my reality for way too many months, it is remarkable. Even just a day – an afternoon – of respite from pain is celebrated. You cannot truly appreciate the feeling of the sun on your skin until you have experienced true darkness.
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