on moving grief before it moves in
There is a particular kind of grief. The ground disappearing mid-step. No last conversation. Just silence where a person used to be. Disoriented. Betrayed. Ghosted by them or by life. I had been carrying that for days, turning it over, finding no place to set it down. The gripping pain pinching my lungs.
Move it or it stays. That's all I knew when I walked in.
My feet find the floor. They instinctively start to stretch, the little toe pulling away, my arches immediately cramping. Somehow, the physical pain is a blessed distraction from the heartsick I have been carrying. I'm in a dance retreat, not entirely sure why, except that I had to do something to move through the suffocating wall that surrounds me.
She asks us to shake. To move in any direction, break the pattern, find a new tempo, return to the shaking. With no choreography my brain finally gives up its endless going over past events, its futile attempt to make sense of trauma, and finds refuge in that tiny moment where my body is motionless — somewhere between the velocity of up and the gravity of down.
This is not a regular practice for me. And yet, the gift of being in my 50s is that I can show up, follow my instinct and my need, and not give a shit who is looking. One clenched hand flies in the opposite direction of the other. I feel the air on my knuckles and the way my knees turn inward to regain balance as I push through the disorientation of moving with my eyes closed.
She asks us to shake the flesh away from our bones. To let our elbows lead. To trust the impulse the body feels. The movements and her voice feel like hidden messages, life instructions I can't quite decode, so I simply continue to move.
We dance at sunset, by candlelight. The etched faces soften into shadows. I can no longer see their full form. She tells us to keep dancing, to move around and find the vacancy in the room, to trust our bodies — they know where they are in relationship to one another, even when we can't really see each other. The double entendre of that line snaps like an elastic band pulled too tight. I retract, but I force myself to continue.
We clump together in the middle. Sweaty, breathing, heartbeats already coherent through music and beat and movement.
She asks us to bring the tempo down. To turn down the volume of our movement and drift, slowly, into one another. We bump up against the invisible barriers we keep between ourselves — the place where I stop and you start. Closer, she says. Fill in the spaces. Be brave.
So we come in closer.
I am squished in the centre, hot, briefly wondering if I should push to the outside. I can feel the slick sweat on the arm of the woman beside me, the hot breath of the one behind me, the softness — a hip, a tummy — of someone to my left. She asks us to listen with our skin.
I hear breath. A tiny shudder. Pressure shifting. We move as one organism, self-organizing, each person finding their place in this pile of hot, humid humanity. And then — stillness.
Perched on one foot because there is no room for two. And then, like a murmuration of birds, an undulation begins. Gentle. Unforced. Governed by our coherent heartbeats and the spaces between us. With nothing to hold onto, I allow myself to be rocked — like seaweed in a gentle tide, back and forth. Held. Weightless. Powerless.
For the first time in weeks, my nervous system lets go.
Each day I came back. Each day, I gave my body a little more, my brain a little less. I don't think about the instruction, I don't wonder if I can do it. I just move.
On the last day, we do lifts. A group of familiar hands surrounds me and as I fall backwards — arms stretched wide, feet together — they raise me over their heads. The pelvis is the heaviest part. My head dangles. My hands are limp. I am floating six feet off the ground.
I feel what it is to lie belly to the sky with no resistance.
They lower me slowly, like something that matters.
I remain limp on my descent, hanging onto weightlessness, feeling the hands of women I have only come to know by the shapes they flow and contort into. And then I feel the cool smoothness of the ground beneath my bare foot. My skin prickles. I register the steadiness below me. I feel one foot, then the other, absorb the hard surface.
They say: and now, a new beginning.
I stand and feel the flush of tears rising from my belly, undefended. Eight people octopus around me and I feel belonging — to them, yes, but more than that, to myself. Somehow, they returned me to me.
Slowly, we each collect our water bottles and our stories, our reasons for coming tucked quietly into our bags. I walk out into the world. I can hear the rhythm in the birdsong. I can feel the counterpoint of my own heartbeat. I can sense the air moving around me as I walk forward.
It lodges, if you let it. I didn't.
