There were Tuesdays that even coffee did not want to know, and this one was exactly one of them.
That morning Konstantin, her son, tossed the first handful of sand into her pocket. Just like that, without asking, declaring somewhere between the door and the shoe cabinet that life was only luck – blind, random, slippery – either it shines on you or it does not. And everything she believed in – inner alchemy, healing, invisible connections – was self-delusion. Buryana froze with a slice of bread in her hand and two drops of tahini on her fingers, which she had just been about to lick. The sand scraped her from the inside like pumice, because it came from someone she loved. But also because her subconscious immediately ruffled its feathers and started checking: “What if he is right?”
While she was wondering whether this was a cry for attention, the first sign of puberty, or a divine test, and whether one can keep neutrality while being flooded by a downpour of personal programs, an email arrived from a colleague in a shared cause.
He had returned to her a “slightly revised” version of her presentation. As if by a magic wand, everything that was hers had disappeared. Everything! – even the commas. At the end, an addition: “Otherwise everything is great. I just think it is more organized this way.” Like a tennis champion, he threw a second handful of sand at her, the kind that makes you wonder whether you ever do anything right at all.
At lunch, Simeon, the ex. They had to sign a declaration for their son’s school. He looked rested, young, as if someone had ironed the creases out of his life.
– This is absolutely phenomenal – he was saying with a smile, and his enthusiasm for the new yoga group and a woman who “sees beyond words” charged her with even more sand, and wet sand at that.
– Wonderful – Buryana nodded, and beneath her breastbone the heaviness increased.
She was already rattling like a children’s toy from the whole quarry of sand and gravel in her pockets. If she started running, she would sound like maracas in a Latin orchestra. But there was no running; she could not move from all this accumulation, from this quiet, dense layer of sensations that are not noticed, but only pull downward. A weight that moved from one pocket to the other, so that she would think there had been a change.
In the afternoon she cancelled everything because she accepted an invitation to an improvised dance circle in a hall with a wooden floor and lighting like in an old station. There was no stage at the event, nor an audience. A circle of people who gathered to move “a little more freely.” The studio where she went dancing held “unregulated” gatherings a few times a month. Today she did not know what to expect, whom she would meet, but she knew that her body did not want to be silent, but to scream.
When Shake It Out began to play, something exploded inside her. As if a dam wall had collapsed, a tsunami was unleashed and flooded the hall. The body that until a moment ago had been poured as if with cement slowly began to move. First the legs, then the back. Then all those handfuls of sand were carried away by the waves.
She realized that neither her son, nor the colleague, nor the ex was getting in her way. What was getting in her way was that thin thread of self-doubt that had somehow crept in again, quietly and unnoticed.
Her movements were becoming bolder and uncontrollable; from the side it looked like “The Great Shaking Out.” The body was shaking itself off like dust from an old curtain.
“I can’t” hit the ceiling and remained hanging there like a bag inflated by the wind.
“I am not enough” flew out the window and climbed onto the hood of a passing car.
“One must not do that” got tangled in the chandelier and stayed there, looking like an offended tomcat.
“I don’t know” spun on the floor, tried to catch up with her, but she gave it her hand, spun it once more, and let it go to its friends.
In this dance Buryana experienced all those moments in which she had wanted to run away from herself. All the small dyings she had accepted with a smile. In it there was room for everything, even for what she had thought she had to drive away.
Now her body was laughing, and her soul even more. When the music stopped, she sank down onto the floor, sweaty and dishevelled, and her eyes were shining. A forgotten feeling was spreading through her – light and smooth like a satin sheet on a bed. The feeling that she was breathing not air, but herself.
At home, among the books, she found an old diary. There was a whole box of “archive of the past, which I will meet when I am ready,” but she had put this one here. On the first page, in childish handwriting, it was written: “When I grow up as big as Mom, I will forgive myself everything. I will dance with my shadow until it grows wings, and I promise I will not step on it”
Everything around her and inside her was dancing. Even the wind had invited itself in through the open window. And that was enough for her to fall asleep “like she had been bathed.”