Time: Two Minutes of Choreographed Dance

His Mother kicked the soccer ball back to center field and scooped up the boy. Hurrying through the side door, she clenched her teeth as the hinge squealed. She tiptoed across the room. Even muffled in his Mother’s shoulder, the boy’s wailing competed with the music. His Mother side stepped into the kitchen, and sat him next to the sink. She wiped the grass stains from his shin as he whimpered pathetically. A girl was dancing in the room. She didn’t flinch. He watched her drift across the floor, one foot following the other in conversation: s l o w - s l o w - quick quick - s l o w - s l o w - quick quick, until she was ten long paces to the wall. She reached out with her fingertips, and brushed the wall, throwing herself back towards the center of the room.

She cherished that empty room. For an hour, until the others arrived, it was hers. With her bare toes, she’d sweep up the dust, and watch it hover in a stream of afternoon sun. She’d stretch out every movement, bouncing lightly from wall to wall, sweeping the entire floor. Pock marked from party banners and sign-up lists, there was no judgment in those walls. The music echoed from their corners, and reverberated in the floor.

Entirely consumed, the dancing girl took no notice of the watchful boy. Just a few measures into the piece, she had succumbed to the driving beat. She couldn’t read music, and she had no understanding of musical theory. She could not play an instrument. She blamed her double-jointed thumbs for her clumsiness at the piano, or her little finger for its weakness on the guitar.

But her feet knew the sound of a drum.

 They heard it at the half beat, and at double time. They diligently followed, in counts of eight. In one measure, they walked four paces to the right, until the knee re-nagged, wrenched the hips backwards, threw the torso off tilt, and peeled up the last standing foot until it was gripping desperately with its toes. There the body hovered at the end of the measure, until the next rushed in, and caught her falling torso on the first count. It would start again. You could say it was time experienced purely in the moment. But it passed so quickly, the moment was indecipherable. With every rehearsal, the moments fused into a chain.

She’d have an hour to rehearse a two-minute piece, precisely two minutes according to competition rules. There, even a strand of hair that floated out of the curtains, and into the judges view, would start the clock. But there were no such rules here. There were no stage lights exposing her vulnerability. And there was a different kind of quietness, a casual quietness. In these two minutes, she felt like she could escape. She hid away everything that weighed on her. But emotion seeped out. Joy quivered in the extremities of her fingers and toes. Sadness dripped from the weight of her limbs. Anger sharpened movement. The pressures of the day were not forgotten, but recycled. Surely every fumble, and likely any breakthrough, was brought on by an upsurge of emotion.

While the drama of her teenage life fed the dance, choreography burrowed its way into muscle memory. Time and space were malleable, choreography their sculptor. She could unwind a single pirouette to rotate one joint at a time, starting at the toe, and working its way up in a snake-like motion, bringing time to a halt. Or she could pin her foot, whip her head around sharply, and the body would follow unnoticed. She could stretch out the arc of a back bend, folding each vertebra over an invisible pocket of air. Then she’d collapse over, curl inwards, and hold the air in tight. Choreography pushed and pulled those two minutes, as if they were made of clay. She left every moment behind, knowing it disappeared the instant it occurred. And she reveled in unpredictability, colliding with each approaching step.

In these two minutes, she knew how it felt for time to pass. She understood it as a substance, one to be used up. The time before was meditative. She spent it calming her thoughts. After, her thoughts were blurred, her mind swollen with adrenaline. The pulse throbbing in her wrists deafened her. She paced across the room, waiting for it to come into focus. The little boy’s cleats scurried out the side door, and a cool draft carried in the sound of children on the field.

When she left the studio some hours later, she was satisfied with a well-spent Friday evening. She started to walk, one foot seamlessly following the other. She paid no attention to the time it took for an arm to swing front to back, or a foot to shift heel to toe. Time tucked itself away behind her, and followed her unnoticed.