SHE ~🎭

I was 19, I was 22, I was skinny and hot as the steaming coffee I drank black every morning from Jack's Deli. I had the grey, fitted designer winter coat. Men turned when I passed construction sites and whistled and put down their hammers. I could dance to anything - salsa, the two-step, improv. I just put on music, and I was all in.

I stole clothes from John Wanamaker and Saks Fifth Avenue; I had boots, bodysuits, and pound earrings. I danced to Donna Summer, Madonna, and Blondie. Under disco balls, under the moonlight, in the Black Banana and Studio 54.

The bouncer always called me to the front of the line. They had nicknames for me and me for them.

I sweat, I jiggled, I fucked, and I judged other women who couldn't dance, didn't have a sense of style, who overate, who were too fat or too loud or too in love or not in love enough. Or they were too old and were wearing too short skirts.

What were they thinking?

I was on top of the world, and I was with a man who loved the wild weed of me, and when he saw me judge another woman or another man or the male prostitute dressed like Little Bo Peep who hung on my front steps leading up to my apartment, he would say things to me about the people I judged.

He would say look how beautiful she thinks she is.

Or he said,  Baby, you don't know her story.

Or he said, she's trying to get attention, let's give her some.

He dug through my closet while I was preparing for dinner with him. When I'd search for my favourite green designer sweater with the pearl buttons, I'd usually find it on Little Bo Peep, and my man would say he was cold; he gave it to him while I was in the shower, and he'd buy me another sweater.

I studied how he moved through the wintery world beside me.

I watched him glide with grace, love, kindness, forgiveness, and laughter. 

He saw something in me nobody else saw, and I began to see it, too. 

He saw my brokenness from my broken family and my potential to love the way we were all meant to love each other. He made love to me tenderly to heal my broken, and sometimes with hunger to catch my insatiable desire to feel even more alive.

He saw my potential to see, my potential to feel, my potential for empathy and kindness - he taught me how to love the too-loud woman checking out at the grocery store and the man who held up the plane and then demanded a different seat after we'd all been waiting a half hour.

He taught me to love the taxi driver who took us to the opera and had eight children who couldn't make his rent. We gave him our tickets, a night at the opera and a check for what he would have made that night.

Love was a verb, and we practised it together.

As a fledging in training, I discovered each person had a story I didn't know, and every person I judged or laughed at or decided who they were was hiding from my humanity because the truth is it's sometimes hard to see.

I began to see Little Bo Peep, whose mascara always seemed to be streaked down his cheeks from crying, and I let him into my designer closet. I began to see all of Jack at the Deli - his gruffness was from lack of sleep from caring for his mother.

When I look back on that time, I understand I was with a man who was my spiritual guide, but he just looked like an electrician from Philadelphia who left hoagie wrappers on the floor of his red Ford Bronco. 

When my writing partner said I should write the scene of me crawling into his open casket after he died, wanting my whole body on top of his entire body one more time - I knew it wouldn't make any sense unless I knew who he was and who I was.
And who I was becoming.

At the funeral, my knees were soaked from his fourteen-year-old son's grief snot - he had collapsed into my lap sobbing, and I was stroking his hair.  Then I stood up and walked toward the open casket. I had to feel his cold, thick lips sewn or glued shut limp hands, and shiny bald head to be sure he wasn't there.

I put one leg up and hoisted myself into his coffin, and I let out a sound no human being should ever make or a sound all of us should always make when we have to let go. It was as ancient as the elephant that rocks the bones of the dead.

It is as ancient as the whale song or the Orca, which carried her dead baby on her back for weeks and miles.

I'm sure my cousins pulled me out of the coffin and took my small writhing ball of grief body outside where the trees could hold my sounds.

The man I loved who left too soon - his memory is still there every day to remind me to have compassion and not judgment because you never know another person's heart until you stop and ask them about their life and listen.

Chaunce launched me out into this magnificent, complicated, and tragic world with a heart that had eyes, and I wanted to say this morning that I see you. I like your story, and I can receive it and reflect your goodness and beauty to you as it was done for me.

Once you know how to love, nobody can take that from you.  

And everything will be okay because love heals - it's the best prescription to cure anything.

❤

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This and other essays appear in Freeing the Turkeys by Laura Lentz, now available on Amazon. 

Write about love on the second Saturday of every month! Go to Literati dot Academy for information on our Love and Eros series.