For Brad (6)

The answer is no, I do not want to dance.  Not with anyone.  I might have never wanted to dance in my entire life. 

But I do, maybe.  I maybe want to dance in another world I know might be real, where boys and girls are the same and my father isn’t showing up every five minutes to remind me to

“Sit like a lady,” he says, his voice stern, and I sit with my knees together in my white tights under my navy blue sailor’s dress with my red patent buckle shoes.  Maybe it was the 4th of July.

“I did,” I say, my voice petulant.  “See?  I did.”

Any memories I have of living with my father in the house were cultivated during a period of around 1000 days before I was four years old.  During that time, I remember being dressed mostly like a doll whenever I was taken into public, and I was a pretty enough baby to have been on the cover of some craft book to make lace. 

I was a pretty enough baby to admonish from anyone’s thoughts the notion that one day I would be plastered wet to the floor of my shower, my hair tangled into wet lumps, throwing up benzos while Brad held onto me, his fingers reaching far down my throat enough to make me wretch them all back up, while singing soft in the echoes of the bathroom I Want You to Want Me in a slow and melancholic way.

“Feelin’ all alone without a friend, you know you feel like dyin’,” he winces while thin bile washes down the drain, circling around his shoe, as he brought me to the shower fully clothed.  “Didn’t I, didn’t I, didn’t I see you cryin’?”

This moment must’ve existed in the heart of the girl I was long before it ever came to pass, like having all the eggs inside my ovaries I’ll ever have in my life at the moment of my creation.  So must I also possess all my talent for my own destruction, and all the violence in my heart.  I don’t know it, as a girl, when I’m told to sit and I sit, ankles crossed, pouting and pretty.

When asked to dance, I might always think of this moment.  I might consider it dancing, in a way, when dancing with me.  The boy who asks is always trying to make beautiful this moment in time, when I am pathetic and self-indulgent and clinging to the wet cotton of Brad.  But it’s Brad I’m dancing with. 

If Brad is a bomb, always exploding, well, so am I.

I want to sit Michael down and explain this to him.  I want to tell him that girls are dark and bloodless and desperate, and most importantly, they do not want to dance.  I want him to understand that life is short and violent, and that we are standing in the wreckage of a rapidly-dying world, and that people are sometimes cruel but always beautiful.  I want to explain to him that the girl he needs to marry is the one who will cut her palm open for him, to mix their blood together.

But those are all Brad's thoughts,