It was on the main terminal’s moving walkway that I first saw the dancing girl. There she leapt, pirouetted, arabesqued, right in between the Starbucks and the Hudson Valley News. Cell phones dropped to the ground, laptops flew, businessmen stood staring with their jaws unhinged.
Back on the ground in the broken City, walking home over broken glass, I saw a sudden flash of light and looked up. There she was for one moment again, flying more fragile than steel, hotter than jet fuel, lighter than all the birds in the sky.
One more of these and then I’m going to end this series and move on to something else, I think.
Maybe love means finding someone you can’t not see.
Maybe she has eyes in the back of her head, on her back, on her arms and belly and legs. Maybe she watches with her entire self, with her entire body, whenever that one is around.
Watching, waiting. Maybe she’s looking for a clue, a key, an open space between the atoms where her gaze can pass through.
Spring is a dangerous season.
The floodwaters rise, like they do every year, and if you don’t watch out they’ll wash away everything in your life that isn’t weighty enough or bolted down. And then one day you’ll wake to find that you’ve divorced your husband and cut off all your hair, and you’re running half-naked through the streets of some strange city with a foreign woman holding your hand.
Mirrors aren’t much good, in Spring. They can only show what’s holding still, and what’s practically dead already: all of the unnecessary stuff, all of the stuff that has got to go.