Flying Angels

— I love you.

I whisper it to her. Her body floats in my arms, moving in time with mine, and the strain is almost unbearable—like a muscle spasm, like pain itself.

She slips from my grasp and clings to me the way a frightened hedgehog curls into itself. My heart hammers—not from exertion, but from feeling lifted to its highest pitch. Yes. Even wounded as we are now, this is a glorious moment, made solid by time itself. I study her face before I can think to feel anything else. But the anguish that seeps through her skin, not necessarily in tears but unmistakable nonetheless, grips me and pulls me back to earth.

— What is it? What's wrong?

I ask her. She weeps the way children sometimes do—with a pain that has no scale, no proportion to its cause, tears falling endlessly. I try to stay present with her, refuse to become a mere watcher again, refuse to drift as I have so many times before into admiring her as though she were a work of art rather than a living, breathing person.

— Tell me. Please tell me what's happening.

She looks up at me, and all I see is a wounded swan, her long neck arching at the weight of my question. So much of her has been shaped by dance that even in her moments as a woman, she becomes a picture of crystalline beauty. I speak without thinking, my words betraying me.

— That's how you should hold your head on stage, not here—but I understand, once a gesture is made, it enters the harmony of the world.

— You don't love me, she says.

Louder than her words, her broken body at my feet speaks the true measure of her pain. Terror floods through me. I reach for her.

— Don't I love you? Tell me—don't I love you?

My words feel thin. I gather her back into my arms, wrap myself around her trembling frame.

— I know, she whispers. I understand it when we dance. Then you're mine, my partner, and yes, then you love me. But afterwards, in real life...

She trails off. More tears slip down her face.

— This is our real life. You have to understand that.

— I'm a woman. I'd like you to let me smile always—at home and away from home.

I stop her with a gesture.

— Then love isn't whole. It's just the shadow of true love.

— I'm a woman.

She says it again, and this time it lands differently.

— No!

I'm nearly shouting.

— You're not just a woman—you're the crown of your gender. Everything, all at once. In you lives the essence of all who have been and all who will come.

— I live. I eat. I sleep. I can bear children.

— That's not essential. Only in dance is our love complete and whole, is it our destiny. Without it, we're no one. We're nothing.

— What are you saying?

Her question catches me mid-breath. In the space of her asking, I feel as though I might finally explain it all.

To become…(I continued telling her keeping my body in flight.) Some spend long years in the wilderness, some hide at the end of the world and grieve, suffer to death. Don’t you see what we’ve got in the two of us? Instead of suffering and penance, we are given the dance. The faces of the flying angels read nothing but the purest ecstasy. Like them, we are asked to provide ourselves where we are happiest. Our fulfilment can come in joy if we find the perfect flight, in circles, from which we will not return. We will rotate until both of us become and remain our love of offering to the world.