Dancin' With Myself
When there’s no one else inside, on a crowded lonely night, I cross my arms and hold my hands to my shoulders, propping the rest of my body. Then I revolve once, twice, three times, faster and faster like a carnival merry-go-round that’s gathering power to take the passengers on a ride. A circular ride that goes and goes and seems like it’s spinning for miles and miles, almost so much that I half expect to step off and be somewhere else, somewhere completely different-not a stale carnival at eleven at night that’s dying with each turned off sign and closed down booth. But it never goes anywhere. I never go anywhere. No matter how much I spin and spin.
But I spin. Because it creates a blur, like a constantly rotating kaleidoscope except it’s me looking out at the world through a changing vision, not the world at me. Lucy with kaleidoscope eyes. Maybe that’s what they meant. I just figure if I spin and spin my eyes will never focus on a face. They’ll never stop to see the scowls, the stares, the gauging, probing, eyes, or even the eyes of a predator. So many faces I don’t have to see. They’re still there but they’re cut up into triangles and dots and a blur of fluorescent lights. Then all of a sudden I don’t see them. Just the wind chasing me as I dance and my hands reached out, catching on short clouds of vision.
But sometime I’m going to stop spinning. Sometime the dizziness is going to become even more than I can stomach and it’s going to turn to a nausea, an overflow from my core and the pits of everything I am and there’s going to have to be a purging, a heaving, until I find myself sprawled across brown blades of what used to be grass. And I’ll wait here because some of the faces will be waiting to pounce, vultures trying to be sure I won’t put up a fight-and some of the faces will be just in too much of a hurry or too preoccupied with maintaining the right degree of scowling, or off banging their gavels elsewhere. So I’ll lay here until I can do otherwise. And when that time comes, when air stops fleeing my lungs, I’ll stand and start dancing with myself. Me, myself, and Atlas.