talonkarrde | step on a crack

We dance through our first date, our living room, our world — together, hand in hand.

Sometimes it’s cheek to cheek, sometimes back to back, but the world is our oyster, our dance floor, glittery and glittering, adorned with anniversaries and life events, triumphs and milestones on which we cut a rug.

We waltz through the problems, twirl through the trials, slide through the arguments, and through it all, never lose our sense of momentum, of inertia. We never stop moving.

For months — for years, even — we simply shed our problems, leaving them behind like all the old, worn out shoes, left and forgotten. We leave them with the old memories, constantly replaced by new ones, better ones. We get better, too; our turns are tighter, our figures sharper, our angles precise and beautiful, and it is easier to think of our problems as ones that only affected us when we were not as good — so that's the history we choose to remember.

Even as the cracks appear — on our dance floors, in our lives — we just keep moving around them. Of course we take care not to step onto jagged edges, but we are masters of our craft, and fear nothing. We had weathered worse, and so we simply keep on keeping on, continuing from site to site, dance to dance, city to city, waiting for steadier ground, feeling ever more confident with each performance, believing ourselves invincible.

And even as the cracks multiply, we cling to that faith: that we could just watch each other, listen to the beat, and make it through anything. We trust in each other, in the dance — even as our careers, our lives, our worlds fall apart. Even as the spiderwebs extend and expand around us, until it is a phantom presence everywhere, even on a new arena, on a new stage.

We held solace in each other, in the movement, in the motions, in the fact that as long as we kept moving, it would all be okay. We would avoid the darkness, avoid being ensnared, and just dance faster, harder, fiercer, and repel the shadows. They only struck those who were too slow to avoid them, and we — we were no such thing.

We danced the dance for years, and every step made us believe in our invincibility; every moment was one where our friends were struggling but we could say ‘but we’re doing just fine’.

So when we stumbled, when we fell, when there was nowhere left to move to and I caught an edge and she stepped back a touch too far and her heel snapped, we had no firm ground to fall onto, just a web to fall through.

There was the dance, and then the fall, and then there was nothing at all.