La Nuit Blanche

So my brother took me out on a dinner and movie date last night, the night of my birthday, a night glowing with a fully resplendant moon.

Over dinner, he talked about incubated pregnancies, sperm injections, and freezing my eggs, in case I become a toothless old hag by the time I want to have babies with someone I like. I think he was trying to cheer me up. Then we went to see a kung-fu flick. We made a mess of the movie theater with spilled popcorn, spattered M&Ms, and Butterfinger wrappers. When we walked out of the cinema, we were shaking and chattering on an explosive sugar high, laughing at the ridiculous plot resolution. Little brothers are so precious, are they not? :)

I am one of those people who got into the tango by way of a terrible break-up. Four-year relationship went bad, poof, the end. I was sad. Mom got worried. She got me a cut and curl at my favorite hair salon, then dragged me to the nearest dance studio. She knows I love Barbara and Juliette Greco. They both sing to the accordeon. Tango has the bandoneon. So, tango it was. And then came the shoe shopping spree, when I smiled for the first time in weeks…months.

I still dream about him occasionally, mostly in the form of nightmares. Photographs of him sleeping strewn on a wooden floor start breathing and coming to life. We ride carnival wheels, and I have a vague sense that I am not where I should be. Something dreadful is about to happen, something dreadful has already happened, and I mourn for something I can’t remember. I see his mother on the street walking towards me, and I want to spit at her. Umbrellas and spectacles, tall hats and hand-written letters fall from the sky and keep popping out of my drawers, but he’s not here. A feeling of tenderness lingers upon awakening from these nocturnal illusions. I jump out of bed, disturbed and angry with myself. Angry at him. How dare he show himself in my sleep? And then I force myself to forget again until the next nightmare.

I once met a woman who showed me a picture she took of her grandmother. Her grandmother is 75 years-old. She still sleeps with her husband. Her husband had died ten years ago. But she keeps a tiny photograph of him on the pillow he used to lay his head on. That’s how she sleeps with him still. Side by side, and dreaming of him at night. Is that what love is?

When the tango took hold of me, it was as if I had found the ultimate lover. No single experience can be as fascinating as this dance. No single work of art is so replete with all the joy and sorrow and longing and tragi-comedy of the human race, as is a tango danced between a man and a woman. It is labyrinthine, yet so simple. Each lasts just a few moments, yet it is eternal. There is a purity amidst all its complexities. The more one searches for the meaning behind its mystery, the ever more elusive is the tango.

And yet, it is what it is, and we can see it, hear it, feel it, breathe it, live it, in the pleasure of its immediacy. Those of us it holds in its power — we want to shape our whole lives around it, its cadences, its sweat, its subtle messages and surging desires. The tango changes us forever. It changed me forever. Never have I been so intensely in love. Never had I felt so intensely alive. It helps me forget. And it helps me remember sweetly.

It helps me come to terms with the deeply human nature of all the heartache I have been through.

I didn’t go dancing last night. But I was thinking about the dance, and all this beauty.

And I felt new life surging inside my breast, on the day of my rebirth.