Not too long ago he would have been surrounded by crumbled up pieces of paper, but now he is just sitting in his living room with just one lamp turned on right above him and his laptop staring at him, wondering how many more cycles of typing and deleting there will be. He has been fixed in his little papasan chair for a good four hours. He's been staring back at the laptop, at the email program with which he is trying to compose an email. What can he say? So many electronic crumbled pieces of paper have been tossed into the electronic oblivion of the information age.
It's wrong, but it's right. He has tried to be assertive, but it was just hollow shell of empty confidence. He tries to remember the last dance. He waited the whole night for the last dance. So important was the last dance. There was at least one other guy who probably wanted to dance with her too. He probably was head over heals with her too. Why not? Every guy in there must have been. Doesn't matter; he won, he claimed victory. And he did his best and he felt his best. He held her, momentarily let her go away in their embrace, then brought her back. He played with her, touched her feet with his at the right moment of the music. He was gentle but also assertive. Assertive, yes, that's the theme. Women love assertive men. In the dance he felt assertive. He showed he knew what the dance would be like.
And she responded the whole time. She moved her arm around his back, showing at least that she noticed and even enjoyed his playfulness. She responded. They have been dancing every night there was a dance and he felt so privileged and hoped she too felt honored to be sharing these wonderful songs with the two best dancers in town. There were other dancers, other guys, just like now, who wanted to take his place and take her away. But no, she always had the best smiles for him, and always danced more than one set of songs with him, which was something he observed never to have happened with anyone else. He used to have this feeling when dancing, but he has nearly forgotten about that unhappy episode. He only thinks about those dark eyes, piercing look under the enigmatic eyebrows. And at the end of the last song of the last set last night he held her tight for a few extra seconds. And in that moment it was as if everything had vanished, all the bad memories, not only of that past where he had a real person in his life to hold on to beyond just dances, but also all the time before and after then of waiting, waiting for someone to connect with, through the dance and then throughout life.
This long final embrace wasn't the first time he had done it with her. After the first time he felt guilty. After all, she had a boyfriend. Their relationship would not go beyond the ending of the song, and after that it was just a plain old friendship. True, he tried to serve her in all ways possible, do her favors, talk about the dances and videos of great dancers and music. It was his way of showing her interest and allowing himself the thought that he was a good person, good enough for something, but good enough. Sometimes she seemed reserved, and he took steps back. But overall, he was progressing in his heart that perhaps something could happen. It didn't really matter that she had a boyfriend, really. After all, he had a girlfriend, in fact, another dancer, for what he felt was a long eternity of trials and tribulations, only to lose her to some obscure young man who didn't even dance. It didn't matter whatever attributes that imbecile had that tore away a piece of his heart. It didn't matter that that wound was never completely healed. Redemption was now in the form of a new woman, taken or not. She was a prize that he constantly felt he won on the dance floor, beating everyone else, all the other man. He was qualified in her eyes, he was sure, to be the best dancer in town, and extending that accolade to real life only seemed natural.
All this he wanted to write down and more, to convince her. He was nervous, but all heros are nervous before a victorious battle. He has thought about this for over 32 hours now, judging from the clock hanging in front of him like a nosy spectator trying to mind his own business. Yet, he hasn't gotten beyond the first sentence of a greeting. He couldn't concentrate on his work and certainly last night after dropping her off at her house and waiting for her to disappear into the darkness, he couldn't sleep. He must have bitten the forbidden fruit again, and this time it was most forbidden seeing the moral and real obstacles before him, but that challenge only added to the excitement of his task.
But perhaps he should just call her. No. Whenever he even thinks about the topic, his voice disappears. The weight of his diffidence just crushes his vocal cords, pulls down his lungs, and whips savagely the stallions of his heart. At those moments he isn't sure if he should dig a hole and crawl in there or embrace her and kiss her for real, but either way, it would be for eternity. That feeling when dancing with her, he wants it forever. The feeling of being a man, being in charge, and a woman that stays with him no matter how the tunes of the life change, wouldn't that be great. She had explained to him all the song's meanings and he memorized them just because her voice had one recorder in the world and that was his ears.
So maybe he should attach her favorite waltz. Yes, that would be a great accompaniment to his email. It's like in the old days, when he was still a teenager, people mail cassettes of music to their love (or lost love). The waltz is about a star in the sea that finds the ship that is her eyes and risks sinking into the deep blue yonder just to bear witness to the beauty of the maiden onboard. The tragic sense of the song riding on thin hope resonates with his heart.
And so he begins to write about the song, as a clever prelude to what he wants ultimately to say. And at that moment a different melody came up. He got a new email message. For a second, his heart stops to make room for a thought and hope that it would be from her. He looks with split-second hopes but is disappointed that it's from someone else. It is from his main competitor, who though in his eyes doesn't dance as well and certainly doesn't elicit the same smiles and length of dances from her, remains a prickly annoyance. He almost doesn't open it but the bit of preview his email program shows of the content piques his interest because her name is in it. Furthermore, she is one of cc'ed recipients, which means she is aware of the content of the message. It is an invitation to a field trip they are doing for dancing in the Big Apple. And the way the competitor phrases it makes him realize that they have been going there quite a few times now. Something strange starts to stir up in his heart. Then it starts to boil and steam. He has thought he knew her well, knew everything she did. He has thought that they talked a lot, enough for him to know everything except issues pertaining to her boyfriend, which ached him too much to broach. But now he realizes there's a lot about her she hasn't or maybe refuses to tell him? Can this be? Why is she going with this man of inferior dancing?
He closes his computer and remains seated in his comfy chair. He feels completely paralyzed. And at that moment he begins to remember again the betrayal a few years ago. The betrayal by his ex-girlfriend with whom he thought he would spend his life. Suddenly, it seemed that all these dances were cheap, the feelings were cheap, superficial, even cheaper than mirage, more false, more fragile. And as the clock resumes its business of ticking away time, the man in front of it stays seated and drowns in his old memories.
