The Maybe of Too Little

There was something about his movements, his every move, that was a dance, always dancing, even when he stumbled a bit, even when he stumbled more and fell over.  Something about love, even the beginning of it, those wayward moments, even lust, makes falling itself, crashing to the bottom or collapsing, like a sack of grain, onto the ground’s hardness: beautiful.  Beautiful in its remarkableness, beautiful in its unremarkableness; always shining and always showing off.  Passion itself, even in its blunt stupidity, erupting in foolish fiery violence, turns to brilliant and captivating fire and flames, the fireworks where two lovers hold hands and pray for the earth to be consumed by the sparks, for the entirety of things to be engulfed in blaze.  Dance of fire, dance of the body coming out of the water, dance of the body committed to pleasing me, dance of the body bent on destroying me.  Whatever it was, as long as this type of love was there, it was good, good as in beautiful, beautiful as in affirmative, affirmative as in saying yes to all of that one, that man, and everything that participated in forming him.  This type, for we know loves, always plural and unique, and the types of loves, if we dare call them that, always plural and unique too, always carrying a stash of secrecy as to its designs and its inner possibilities.

            This type, because this type of love fell away one day, or tottered past its standing and staying anymore.  While other loves for the man who danced through me might remain, there is a love I lost at once: the dance ended; the dancing partners turned their backs on each other for good; the ritual of courting, then commitment, then enhancing one another slowly and with endurance, was replaced by–bitterness and pettiness, the worst enemies of this kind of love.  Hungry worms, these two, and they will prove themselves so by munching and gulping their way through the thickest and healthiest soil, the most fertile ground of lovers, and leave in their wakes, unlike our beneficent earthworms, rot and decay and nastiness.  One day I did something, or he did something–it all became rather confused where the beginnings of things lay; a fight was as it were an agreement, from both sides, to take part in destroying each other equally.  But it happened, one day–or maybe it was a collection of days in disguise, but it finally showed itself to me in a way I could recognize, with its gruesome mask, one day and that day alone; at last it revealed itself–and I ran.  I ran and closed what was sweetness and all affirmation, what was at bottom a promise to each other, unspoken perhaps, but a promise all the same.  But promises–they break and are broken and that is that.  Choices and commitments are made and then undone and that is that….  There is this one painful reminder, however, painful because it reminds you of how powerless you are at bottom: that promises, and choices and commitments or engagements, are remade as well as they are broken, so there remains always and ever–wavering, uncertainty, a kind of regret if you had the boldness to admit it.  The boldness to say to yourself in your heart, lulling the head with its song, or mesmerizing it, Maybe, just maybe, I could have gone on dancing.  Maybe I became a worn-out hack of a dancer and gave up too soon, before the music was over and before my final pirouette or lunge.  Maybe I made a mistake, and walked out of the venue well before the curtains were closed.  That rush of nervousness that comes with all these Maybes, when you turn around and see, from the distance, that the lights of your performance center are still on, on for you and flashing on the stage as brilliantly, for the emptiness, as it did when you were into your role and danced with the best bones of your body.  Such is the accompaniment of, or what follows as wet follows rain, all choices and turns concerning what matters, the rush like the rush of nervousness of the Maybe of What If, the Maybe of Too Soon, the Maybe of Too Little.  So you turn around, or you keep walking away, to your room and alone, or you stop dead in your tracks and contemplate empty-headed and exhausted in heart like the dead: you do something, we always do something, and we are flooded with a rush, a rush like nervousness, all the same at such times.