One Minute Dance

She led another girl — they moved so fast.

I thought: She always follows when I dance with her…

Leading her partner on another song I say: I saw you two dancing and tried to see who was leading, but you moved so fast. She laughs: Oh, she was leading. She’s good.

It’s getting late. I order an Uber, put on my boots and sweater.

Three minutes before my Uber I say to her: I saw you leading, you’re good. She says: I sometimes lead — we can try that.

I say: OK, but I have to go. Oh, you’re leaving, she says, sweeping her glance over my hat and sweater. I walk towards the door, then step back to her, Hey do you want to lead me for one minute? I have an Uber coming in two. Sure, she says, reaching out her arms, hands palm-up.

She turns and moves me, tries to rotate me inwards against her chest. I resist.

The next time she rotates me inwards, my back to her chest, her arm around me, I allow it.

In that moment I feel myself calm.

Why am I not-calm in all my other moments? When she wraps me up against her, my nervous system feels right, relaxed. How can this one moment in a relatively awkward, one-minute dance, be relaxed?

Imagine two types of experience in connection, butterflies-in-the-stomach and…calm.

A still moment in a hectic life, in a one-minute dance. A moment from nowhere to nowhere. Here and gone.

The dance continues, and the song ends. I thank her, my mind turning away.

She hugs me.

Two moments over two minutes are stranger than the stillness when she holds me against her. The choosing to turn back and offer to dance, and the hug as I am thinking to turn away.

I hadn’t asked her to dance for months. I’d come to always let her ask.

Something shifted when I asked her about leading, when she offered to lead, when I thought of a one-minute dance with her right then.

And the hug.

I didn’t consciously initiate it, but what if she didn’t have any intention or reaction from outside the moment either and we both just let it happen?

I seek relating that’s consciously chosen without intention beyond the moment and without reacting to anything outside the moment. Relating that’s attuned, two regulating each other.

Dancing with her is new for me, as it seems for her the moment’s everything. And she draws me in to that. Even if I can never again claim anyone as my own, I would still choose that kind of relating.