Madame Butterly has always made me cry. I don't even like love stories, or maybe just not the modern ones.
But on the recording I've got, I can hear the strength of the emotion in her voice, I can hear the depths of her pain and I sit here and shake with gratitude of the day something snapped in my head and I realized...
...how beautiful it is to feel such tremors.
And I understand my own why of love, I understand why I hold myself so far away unless I can come that close and then I hurl myself with all the force of a child jumping from a tree into a river.
Leaping as I look, somewhat.
The in between isn't worth the effort. Companionship is not one of my dire needs. A boy, girl, drooling fankid on my arm does so very little for my confidence, if anything it impinges on my own definition of myself and definitely gets in the way of the going-aboutness of my own rather singleminded life.
But to let go; to let this utterly go; to use the syllables of such an overdrawn phrase "I love you" and whisper them with all the weight of all the emotion warehoused in my bones, in my overactive brain, to whisper them without fear of retribution, without fear of social circumstance, without the pressure of wearing my faces and holding my shoulders squared
that handful of words, or any other, "you're wonderful" or "thank you", even, head just bowed enough to loose that vulnerability...
...that handful of words are the magic mantra, the verbal components of the most powerful spell I've ever discovered and my favourite guilty indulgence.
Fragility. Vulnerability. Packing every pain and insecurity in my body into a handful of melodic syllables and whispering them into a void, emptying myself, and then lying there in a pool of warmth and perhaps even trust and allowing myself to really rest, to rest without maintaining that one last wall that always sits between myself and the universe.
I love tears for that, and I sit here with tears welled just enough into my eyes for me to feel them heavy in the very back of my eye socket and I am crying for nothing, I am crying because it's quiet, I am crying because it's a day off and I feel so useless in my skin.
We went climbing yesterday and I pushed. And I pushed. I climbed three of the 5.7s that I didn't even think I'd be able to climb one of last week, and I made it thirty feet up the sixty foot 5.6 that I hadn't been able to make it off the ground on before.
I pushed and afterwards we went home and got dressed and I pulled out my velvet because something in me wanted so desperately to.
And since Kitty is velvet and lace girl, and since Rob wanted to head to the "Velvet Underground", I growled my body upright and filled myself with sugar to siphon the alcohol with and we went and we drank and we danced and at the Big Bop we caught Mikey's set and I leaned into Dead Can Dance and marveled at ever hearing them in a club again and at the Velvet there were faces from the Montreal scene that I'd never expected to see taking up the center of the dancefloor again.
And through all that, the beer and the dancing and what the SHanghai Cowgirl shamefully attempts to call a poutine (scarce amounts of shredded orange cheddar and CHIVES?!?) in my head I was already preparing myself for today.
For the day off. For the day off where we could wake up real slow, eat real well (I'm quite proud of how my baked spinach and three-cheese omelette turned out) stretch out overburned muscles and...
hit the walls.
In my sleep I was on those walls, adjusting my weight and balance and footwork. Relearning the moves I discovered yesterday. This morning I showered and let the hot water run over each part of my arm and whispered encouragements under my breath to it, this afternoon I focused on the sore parts of my legs with every step in the street and in the house, and by the time I'd schooled my body into believing that it didn't really hurt all that much, that it was ready to push and try again
by then it was late into the afternoon and the day was turning into something entirely other than what I'd expected it to be.
I'm not good at dealing with sudden change. I need my twenty four hours to plan whether or not I'm going to shave pieces of me and should I wait to wash my hair, I need time to scrounge up the courage to face the strangers at the gym, and maybe at the bar afterwards where I was looking forward to meeting Allie's friends only somehow now my courage has crawled under the back porch
and I am locked in a vacancy, knowing full well that I'll climb better tomorrow and that if I want to advance to three times a week then I should wait until tomorrow anyway and all of it makes sense but
oh
Madame Butterfly is dying of a broken heart and somehow I just want to be crying right now.
I want my tears. My heart is lost in the wistfulness of Saturday's movies and my body just wants to cry
because it is still when it expected to be vibrant
because I can
because I have the courage to.