Back when Allen and I actually had to find/make opportunities to see each other we used to go dancing every Thursday night at a local university. Those lovely evenings in the gym spent swinging our way around the floor are among my dearest memories....But then we got married and moved to a place where every week the local swing dance association held a dance within walking distance of our apartment only to find that grad school left me little time for dancing and being married actually took away some of our reasons for going dancing in the first place. So we just sort of stopped going. Then we moved back to whence we first came, but in starting our new routine there were some things we just never picked back up.
This evening I was banging about rather aimlessly back in our computer/sewing room, when I finally looked up at Allen and said "Let's go dance in the living room." We still remember how to dance and how to have fun doing it. I will admit that now I can snuggle up to him all night every night dancing doesn't make the same little shivers run tingling along my spine, but it brings back all the memories of the times when it did. Now, the sharp awareness of not belonging has been exchanged for the equally heady warmth of belonging. It strikes me that we learned to dance together while we very aware of just how much we didn't belong to each other. Perhaps we need to learn to dance as though we do belong together and didn't merely hope to one day. We do finally have a living room big enough... I didn't realize marriage changed everything so much.
1 comment:
What a great post, Natalie. If my husband wasn't in bed, I'd go dance with him right now (even though I don't know how to dance and I look like a fool when I try)! We're going to a wedding this weekend though, so we'll dance then!
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