choreography 1

10/5/20

6:45, somehow eyes open, can’t close. 

The sun doesn’t visit as she normally does. In these months alone and away, I’ve learned to track the time from where it hits my wall when I wake up. Usually it’s 7:30, but today my body is confused. 

Where are you sun? Where are you?

It is getting colder here. 

I hear other footsteps throughout the house, yet by the time I decide to make breakfast their sources have since disappeared. I move through my morning alone, intersecting the spots where my mother made coffee, where my father left his green sweatshirt on the chair. I steal the sweatshirt and put it on. My sister, asleep in her room. 

10:00, cinnamon and coffee on my lips I see faces I haven’t seen in a while through my screen. 

How is Mass?

I am very lonely, but it is beautiful. 

I start with my hair up and then I take it down and then I put it up again. We’re moving together. Somehow, despite everything I find my way here always. Advice rings in my ears:

You will always find a way to dance

And I know it is true. I will. 

Thank yourself for this hour my friend says. And I do. 

12:45 I get an email saying: 

Thank you for applying. We have decided to pursue other candidates with greater qualifications at this time. 

The sun comes out. 

There are 15 tabs open on my laptop. The long list for the 2020 Booker Prize, a British bookshop called Blackwell’s (to order Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward), the New York Foundation for the Arts job board, Indeed, Upwork, the Dance NYC job board, Goodreads, and Squarespace. I don’t end up ordering the book. I have enough.

Dad’s home.

Did you steal my sweatshirt?

Yes.

Later:

Would you be interested in a position in New York?

Yes. 

The sun stays for the afternoon, my hands pruned from the dishes. 

I check what all of the people I love are listening to on Spotify.

I’ve been listening to the same artist for three months. I wonder if my friends notice, if they keep tabs on my song choices too.

I fold clothes so my mom doesn’t have to when she gets home. 

Sun is setting.

I decide to go outside and read. 

I’m underlining “Everything I do is a weird pocket of experience” in T Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through in an orange pen when I realize a mosquito is attempting its chances with me. 

I decide to go inside. 

Time passes, I spend it with Mom. 

We laugh sometimes and then we’re quiet sometimes with the world and its complexities spinning around.

I fall asleep on the couch before 10, watching dance on TV.