Ecstatic Dance

A day of new experiences. A warm night in Berlin. When I am beside you, I am confident, and I want to live.

You do this kind of thing, you’re a dancer. You seem to dance through life, nimble and sure-footed, delicate and graceful. And I am bound to accompany you, wherever you go, sure not to stumble or trip over the tangled roots of life that lay before us.

So tonight we leave your flat, get in the uber, and I follow your guiding light up a staircase to a top floor of an industrial block, not knowing what to expect, or how to act.

We’ve missed the meditation. There were a few more important things to attend to. But we make it for the cacao. This dance is fuelled not by uppers or alcohol, but pure chocolate. I’m so intrigued by this new experience. We sit and stretch, talking about your previous visits here and how great the DJ is, you can feel the buzz in the air.

You’re a dancer in the purest, most elegant sense; I’m a dancer in the dirty sense, having sweated in countless warehouses around the world. My mind is racing, but I remind myself that I’ve moved to the beat for half my life, and I’ve never once felt self-conscious when dancing. So why would I start now?

There is no room for doubt with you.

I’ve always had a habit of getting lost in my own head, of inwardly screaming and outwardly staying grey and unshaken, but with you I am completely and totally present.

The music starts.

The dance travels through tempos, the bass shakes, the beat builds. Dub moves into house moves into techno moves into psytrance. Pounding drums, shrieking synths, and by the final song of the journey and we are a swirl and scream of pure energy.

Have you ever howled to the moon with your girlfriend, whilst the music is all you can hear and her eyes are all you can see?

My soul never told me how badly it needed that.

There is a freedom here that I’ve never experienced, and I’m addicted to it.

After the first musical journey, the sound dies down, and the DJ asks everyone to sit on the floor and meditate. It feels inappropriate to be overtly intimate, so we don’t lessen the experience by kissing, despite the intoxicating mutual energy flowing between us. We place our hands over each others hearts, feeling the thump thump thump which is somehow louder than the music was. We yab yum, her sitting on my lap, face-to-face, and we gaze.

I fall into your eyes. Not just stare, but fall, endlessly, until I am encompassed by your heart and soul and lungs, your heavy breathing matching mine. We’ve talked about the spirituality of locking eyes without breaking your gaze, and we experience it whenever we see each other, but this is a different feeling, a different setting, a different energy.

My heart is screaming that I love you, and I know yours is screaming it back, but we don’t say a word.

Just stare.

And fall.

The music starts again, we rise and it takes us on the same transcendental journey, accelerando and crescendo and crashing and banging and by the end we are sweating and moving and I am totally lost in it.

You dance and twirl like you’ve never carried any weight on your delicate shoulders in your life. Which I know is not true. So the strength you show to move as unrestricted and unbound as you do is doubly intoxicating.

We intertwine, we move around each other, you bend backwards lissom and light, though I don’t let you fall.

But we’ve fallen all the same.

The final drop of the music, the final flashes of movement, with no one else in a packed room, dripping perspiration, howling once more. Then the music softens and we’re invited to lay down on the floor once again.

Your head on my arm, your eyes in mine, and despite the mandated silence of the dance we whisper to each other. The sweetest words that have ever left my lips, and I mean all of them. Your reciprocal energy, making me feel so wanted, and you mean all of them too.

I’ve realised I can’t be self-conscious in front of you. To be beheld in your eyes is to be truly seen.

For too long I have hidden parts of myself in order to be wanted.

But tonight I realise I am free, and I am in love.