salute to the last dance before closing time
The last time I danced was in Port St Johns. We’d hired a house on the beach and I danced barefoot on the patio to progressive trance. The night was balmy and smelled of salt and sea and Paula’s apple tobacco smoke. Cold champagne fizzed on my tongue. We drew General Franco mustaches on our top lips with eyeliner and wore red hibiscus flowers behind our ears. We played with poi on the lawn. The kids ran wild. That was New Year’s Eve 2006, or maybe 2007. Three or four years, it doesn’t matter, it was a long time ago.
We used to dance all the time. Go out to a trance party or a club and dance all night until the sun came up. Then we’d dance like we’d just hit the floor running. The music’s always best at sunrise. Maybe it’s the introduction of solar energy, maybe it’s clever DJ’s lifting your weary bones with something progressive and upbeat. We don’t do that anymore.
Yesterday Julian tried to blame AJ. I pointed out that she’s only been around seventeen months, two and a bit years if you count the pregnancy, so this stagnation of movement, these concrete feet, can’t be her fault. We can’t blame everything on her.
We no longer dance and we have a mortgage in suburbia. People keep telling me that Observatory isn’t suburbia but, with all the nannies in the park, the toddlers at Story Time in the library, the young families buying up houses because (like us) they can’t afford to live in the city, it sure feels that way. It’s the last outpost of our youth and the first stop on the road to middle age.
Lately, my life feels like a series of chores performed by rote: make the bed, wash the dishes, feed the baby, hang out the laundry, grocery shopping, check email, jot ideas on to stickies. I feel a bit like the lion pacing the big cat enclosure at Joburg Zoo. Down the steps to the water, up the steps, along the concrete platform and back down the steps to the water. Hours are swallowed up by these small, mundane (or hopeful in the case of the stickies) tasks. They’re exhausting and unfullfilling and everyday I wonder at another day gone and nothing important achieved. So, a month ago I got it into my head that we were going to the last trance party of the season. Everyone seemed keen and all the hopes of the beastie walking in tightly wound circles inside me were pinned on this weekend. I wanted to dance, break free, go wild. I wanted all of this with a quite desperation and felt if my desire were left unsatisfied I might go mad. I lined up the baby sitter and prepped my husband – both while he was awake and by whispering subliminal messages into his ear while he slept.
On Saturday, Julian said he didn’t feel like it. “Maybe we’ll go tomorrow,’ he said. My heart sank a little, but there was hope. If I only got to dance for two hours, well, two was better than none. I felt like Annie, wishing for a better tomorrow.
On Sunday, at 2pm, I stood folding the laundry that had been sitting in a basket waiting to be put away for the better part of the week. I’d been avoiding it – of all the chores I hate, I despise this one the most. I shed a few tears while pairing socks.