disappearances

All the dances have disappeared. There is no Foundation, nor archivist. Only the storage shed, and the tubs of VHS tapes and DVD’s are tucked behind her husband’s back stretcher, which is a pain in the ass to move.

Once, not so long ago, she had spent five years making a dance. It had gone all the way, so to speak, been produced by a somewhat reputable venue. She had even had the dance company name lit up on the marque visible from the 101 freeway. But there was no proof of it now. Did it even happen? So many dances, by other people, had been made and produced by that same venue since then. So many other names on the marque. The dances just kept coming. There is always someone else’s dance to replace yours.

She had disappeared once. On a Thursday in March. Like others had before her. She knew it probably felt like a death to her colleagues because that was what it had felt like to her when a colleague disappeared. It happened every other year or so. Someone would be there and then they wouldn’t. And there would be speech, like, so-and-so has decided to move on but we cannot say more. The truth is, there had been trouble stirring and it had been best to call her union rep, turn in her laptop, and walk out. She had to admit it did sting when she had to be escorted off campus by an HR representative. But she had turned that into the best worst day of her life. She had written it, so it must be true.

She had even made a dance about disappearing. Of course, she had. The dance consisted of short gambols, which always began with man and a woman facing each other, and always ended with one of them leaving. Because she was not a dummy, she knew what this meant about what she knew about men and women.

Another way to think about it all though, was that there was some sort of magic going on. This was the thing about dance, it was there, and then it wasn’t, even right as it was happening. So, in the end, all that’s left of a dance is a trace, in your mind’s eye, of the movement and the feeling and the images. This alchemy of memory can live for quite some time, within the body and without. How many times would she be talking, and a line from one of her dances fed naturally into conversation? Hundreds. (Because her dances had words. Her dances spoke.) Sometimes, when she reached back for her daughter’s hand as they were crossing the street, and her daughter was just at tad too far behind to grasp her hand right away, it was the dance she had made years before, happening, right there, in the middle of the crosswalk. So, as dances disappear, they also arrive.

This is a nice idea. But the reality is that the storage shed is filled with spider webs and no one is going to send out those VHS tapes to be reformatted, and someday, after she is gone, her daughters will not know what to do with all those dances. They will stand over the tubs and look at the archaic media and say, why did she save all of this crap? And they will not understand that she had been trying not to disappear while knowing it was inevitable.