"Time heals all... time heals all people wounds"

The night he told me he was done dancing, we stood in the middle of my bedroom and hugged. I tried to keep myself as composed as possible, but I couldn’t stop the tears streaming down my face and there is only so much blubbering a person can choke down. As I cried for the loss of our partnership, I couldn’t help but think that that moment was what true intimacy is. That was by far the most vulnerable we had ever been with each other. The intimacy came from a place of sadness; it was the bolero we never had a chance to practice because we didn’t feel comfortable moving together that way yet. I know that pain makes for good art, but it’s a truly terrible feeling when your dance partner gives up on you. He held me as I cried and I couldn’t help but notice how perfectly our bodies fit in that hug; we were standing in our smooth frame body positions, exactly where we have trained our bodies to fit together for the past two and a half years. But the topline was different. Instead of the big frame for grand gestures and ease of movement, our topline was small and heavy. Arms wrapped around each other, my head started on his shoulder but soon turned the other way into his chest where his heart beat on my cheek. His calm heart ticked at half the speed of mine. He was wearing that navy blue sweatshirt he left in my room freshman year for a few weeks that I wore when I was sad or stressed out because it smelled like him and he was safe for me; if I smelled like him I would be okay because he was okay. And now, that bittersweet sweatshirt has my tears forever entwined in the cotton fibers with his scent. He dipped his head around my shoulders, bringing his fluffy mop of hair and the skull underneath it to connect with my wavy, greasy hair after a long day of stress and the brain underneath that was struggling to stay afloat. And we stayed like that until the hug went from sad but comfortable to so psychologically painful that I could not continue to be physically near him anymore. I needed time to mourn the loss of what we had, but using dance to heal would only deepen the wounds. I became the sweatpants-clad, somber post-breakup zombie cliché I was trying so desperately to avoid becoming. I am lucky that my first dance partner became my best friend, my partner of two and a half years, one of the first friends I met at college, and so much of my world. But our world was so delicately balanced that toppled with a few sentences and a hug.


S.K.