I move a lot. I currently live in New York City, but I was born in Arizona and have lived in multiple homes between then and now. Moving is mostly fun and exciting, but it has its difficulties. A major difficulty is keeping contact with old friends.

Blues dancing is one of the few situations I can think of in which touching heads means more than touching hips. My blues is often danced in closed position, legs staggered and hips glued together, each note of music traveling into the ears, pooling in the soul and extending out through pelvis and limbs. The closeness of the hips doesn't mean anything; it's just another way to make the dance more beautiful.

I can think of only five dances where my lead and I have let our cheeks and foreheads rest against each other. 

Last night, I pilgrimaged through Haverford, Ardmore, and central Philly to the Twisted Tail for a night of live blues music and dancing. "Church on Saturday, Blues on Sunday," someone would joke later that evening. 

I could see her lying there, huddled in a white blanket, serene and unperturbed by the chaos that surrounded her. Though I had always known that moment was enivatable, I had taken no measures to prepare myself for it, and had been taken aback when I found out what had happened. In the glimpse of an eye, one of the most important people in my life had ceased to physically be in my life, and as much as I craved to hear her voice once more, I knew I never could. The cheeks that had never gone a single day without red rouge, were now so inspid, drained of their vivacity, of my grand mother's characterist animation.

During the last couple years of high school, I would carpool with one of my friends who lived in the next town over because he lived ten minutes closer to our school. We had carpooled previously with other nearby students while our parents drove all of us, but had not spent a lot of time just in each other's company. Now, with the freedom that our licenses granted us to our own transportation, we could talk freely about everything and anything. In that time I learned so much about this person who I had thought was very closed to the world due to his discomfort and resulting silence in group settings.

We sat together on the bus. Quickly filing onto the bus, and sliding into a seat, each so focused on our conversation with someone else that we must not have realized we were sitting together until the bus had begun to move. At that point we must have exchanged pleasantaries, and engaged in casual conversation in between talking and laughing with others sitting nearby. It was a long bus ride, and I presume there must have been periods of silence, and staring out of the window. I thought about it some weeks later, a few months later, and now a couple of years later, yet I have never been able to recall a single word we said to each other that day. That day was the first memory I have of us, two strangers. The next thing I remember is that we were inseperable.

They came unannounced. I hadn’t the time to start a new pot of tea. Instead, they sat, poised and deathly silent. Doubt next to Ambition, knowing that she’d feel suffocated, while Hatred perched himself on the edge of the sofa, closest to me. I could have screamed, but Dignity looked at me as if I was a child on the brink of a tantrum, so I excused myself. When I go to that place, the place where none of them are, I feel hollow, carcass-like. But when I return, I am full to the brim, drowning in the self. Grief, my old friend, she looks after me. Whenever things become too light, she drags me back to her apartment and steeps me in heavy. I love her though. I couldn’t live without her. Happiness is too flighty for these sorts of gatherings.

Isn’t it fascinating, that the simple act of holding someone’s hand can mean so many things to so many different people? We learn the art of holding one’s hand at a very small age. Parents tell their children to hold their hand when they cross the street, which is their way of saying “I’m here to protect you, I want no harm to come to you because my love for you is infinite.” So much is said in an action that we hardly think of. It is not just parents and children that hold hands. Friends, lovers, and siblings hold hands. It can be a tight squeeze, to let the other know that they are there for them in a difficult time, or to just tell them they are not alone.

Observed through the glassy panes of the storefront window, the clouds appeared ripe with charged energy. Good, I thought. I had been hoping for a thunderstorm to break the summer heat, and the sky looked promising. I returned to my dogeared copy of Tender is the Night, still open and turned down on the table to preserve the progress made. Taking a sip from a tepid cup of coffee, my gaze wandered, resting on the backlit screen of a laptop belonging to a well-dressed man directly in front of me. I took in the whole scene in front of me. He was typing away at a document, contentedly sipping a hot drink, feet crossed at the ankle--let me rephrase: prosthetic feet crossed at the artificial ankle. I was interested.

My high school was a boarding school that required everyone to live in a dorm. The facilities were their finest: a little cute shoe shelf with an umbrella stand inside, a toilet on the left, a shower booth on the right, and two beds and desks on each side, a big window at the very end of the room welcoming all the comers. The meals were all fine too. They were on the media frequently how my school meals provide both healthy and delicious food. I thought maybe in all these quality of facilities, I would not have any problem adapting myself. But it did not take me a long time to realize how it was not the facilities, but it was people –especially a roommate- who influence the most when adapting to that little new society. When we first encountered, we thought we would be best friends.