“Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.”
— G. Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics
I found it when I used to go dancing. I was following the blue-light sound of back-alley music, the smash of hard skinned drums and the anguished high of a cymbal hit. It was a strange place, the DJ spinning decks on a plank hanging from the ceiling on two-story chains like a ludicrous sex swing table. Everyone there was watching everyone else with a rumble underneath that was pure conversation. I wandered from the gallery to the stairs to the hall through the main room into the kitchen into another hall out onto the fire escape and couldn’t find the same topic twice. It became my favourite place to go. A white door, a long narrow stair. It was strange and they let me in for free. They never told me why. Cover was expected at twenty dollars a trendily coiffed head. My mother would go to bed and I would lay in the dark for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. I would get up, flick on the lamp, find my clothing, and step carefully into the dark basement, so dark that I could never see my next step. No one would ever talk to me, I was an inviolate silent institution that would only arrive to dance. Once every night, and I never could pin down how long, everyone else would drift to the walls and watch me. I would be left in a flail of skirts, whirling alone in the middle of the spartan hard-wood floor, picked out like an emblem in corrupted gold light. It was like a game, me and the music players. My syncopated feet and arms and the languid pulse of heavy, heavy beats. Inevitably, someone would dim the lights and the music would change into a weapon, shifting for me to play with. I would spin, throwing my head back, face painted stiffly with a narcotic wild grin. My hair would whip back into me so fiercely hard it stung. I used to ask, “Were you ever there?” to blank repeated stares of denial set to repeat. These were not my friends, these were a flowing river of archetype, different people every evening who always looked the same. I tried to go back, after my accident. There is no door anymore.
Matthew‘s just called. I’m not sure exactly why he’s bothered, though I’m glad I was here for it rather than leaving him to blather at my answering machine. I was short with him, but relationships with me end when I have run out of patience, when caring about someone does not balance everything that’s lacking grace, and he has yet to offer me anything to give me laughter again no matter how deeply I want him to. Three times I waited for him to find nothing at my door but a hollow space of betrayal. There was no hand clutching a hopeful batch of flowers. The only hands that found me were the hands on the clock ticking over to too late again. I curl up in myself at night, wanting more than this empty place inside of me where I can touch where I cared for him. Dreams of running colour taint everything my eyes rest on, wanting red and plum and accents of some escape velocity. Instead I silently scream at my keyboard, throwing out sentence after sentence that I delete because I carry something that I can’t proclaim, that I can’t dissect out of pain and hope and ridiculous female youth. Details run under everything in Vancouver these days, like I can see every thread in a weave of cloth, but the pattern is inescapably dull to my heart.