Stormshine
We were just finishing school for the day when the alarm on my phone sounded. It was the shrill-flat tone of an urgent weather alert, and was accompanied by the words: “WARNING: TORNADO WATCH IN YOUR AREA. My eyes went immediately from my phone to the sky, scanning for any sign that we should run to our filthy, 19th century basement. It was raining, but darker clouds were moving in. I watched them come for about twenty minutes before sheets of pounding rain driven by fierce winds struck the house. The responsible thing to do at that point was round up the girls and go huddle on a picnic blanket in the basement reading a book about volcanic activity in Hawai’i, so I did. But that’s not what I wanted to do.
I wanted to remain at that window, braving the wild wind from behind glass, or even go right out into the storm. In the climax of my first completed (though unpublished) novel, my main character, Jade, stands on the hillside where her mother was killed by a lightning strike and screams into a storm as fierce as that one. All writers live vicariously through their fiction. The closest I come to braving the elements is the cold dips that friends from co-op host every month. Every time I scramble back out of the water I turn and roar. I can’t help it. The rush is incredible. And I so rarely allow myself the luxury of abandon that even a little goes straight to my head. I’m a lightweight when it comes to letting go.
Last month my husband and I attended the wedding of an old friend. The reception featured the kind of dancing that happens when you get a group of adults drunk on the dream of eternal freedom from loneliness, clear space on the floor and play music really loud. Something happens in my body when other people around me are allowing themselves to be exuberant. It’s like my center of self-awareness drops from my head and shoulders into the region of my belly and hips. My movements get lower, wider, looser. On the dance floor I am my boldest, most aggressive self, like my husband and sports. I can’t say that I’m in my element, as I’m not a particularly good dancer, but music is, for me, an invitation to bypass my brain (read: inhibitions) on the way into my body. It feels good to move the way I want to move, and the way I want to move is sexy.
This is a problem for me. All my inhibitions are channeled towards controlling this fierce, fiery, funny, playful and exuberant side of myself, and that side is allllllll tangled up with my sexuality. I had a hard lesson in the consequences of lowering my shields when I was first married. As I had kept my exuberant side on a tight leash (more like in a box on a shelf) until getting married, I started to experiment with letting it out once I got a taste for it in my new, shared, bedroom. Apparently, being playful as an adult can be easily mistaken for flirting, which is probably something that most twenty-two-year-olds would already know but I didn’t. Being seen as a flirt can make for all kinds of awkward encounters, as I quickly realized. It was better to keep my head down and play respectable wife, which got a lot easier once I started having kids and the magnificent drudgery of early motherhood stole every bit of my energy. From ages twenty-four to thirty my clearest idea of “fun” was sleeping through the night uninterrupted. To this day I cannot remember what it is like to sleep eight hours without waking up even once, and I am reflexively protective of my sleep, but at least exhaustion is an occasional annoyance rather than my norm. With my returning energy over the past few years has come the desire to fling myself into something outrageous, like a dance party (lightweight, remember?), but I still struggle to release my hold on conventional expectations enough to let my freer side take over. And then, of course, there’s the body issue.
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