To the Dancer Who Touched My Back
It's a hot night and the people in charge stand on tables. I turn toward the sound of the wood creaking under their weight. The choreographer raises his voice and waves his arms. Conversations slow around me in the humid Berlin air.
The choreographer stomps on the table to get our attention. I am not a dancer but have heard much about the show already. Still I listen closely and obediently. He tells us that we are about to enter a dance performance meant to de-center vision, a show put on by a mix of blind, visually impaired, and sighted artists. In the service of working with non-visual senses, we will likely be touched, he tells us, unless we choose to sit on the side of the room designated as a no-touch zone. He reminds us that there will be periods of total darkness and asks us not to leave, especially not during those periods, unless you really have to—that ghost warning. Inside it is the potential that today’s touches might bring up memories of bad touch, trauma touch. I know this language from Oakland, where I, and many of the dancers are from. At home, we give this warning often. We know that touch means many things, especially now.
With a smile and a bow, the choreographer finishes. I surge forward with the first wave of sweaty humans toward the opening doors. I want to get in fast and make sure I get a seat in the middle of the black box theater, the part that he said would be most interactive. I sit down quickly in one of the chairs in the center of the room, ignoring the people who wander indecisively.
The lights go down and many of us begin to sniffle, maybe a response to the lack of visual stimuli, a need to fill the room with something else. It's dark, very dark, just as he said it would be. Soft, rhythmic music pulses, and soon I begin to feel you crawling across my feet. Your shirt catches on my sandal, and then I feel the looseness of your belly brushing over my toes. I think my feet are in your way. I refuse to move them. I was told to sit here and wait for you to come. I was placed here to make contact with someone I can’t see. I feel your toes drag over my toes, knuckle against knuckle. You groan softly as you crawl toward the person next to me.
“Your touch comes without expectation, without rhythm. Moments later, the music shifts and I realize that my eyes have closed, an unnecessary instinct. I hear you at my back now, your mouth and breath at my neck. ”
I don’t know who you are. You could be a friend of a friend; you could be an artist I met in a warehouse five thousand miles away in Oakland; you could be the person who got the same grant that I did from our city, begging from the rich the way we do to take an airplane to Berlin to make our work, or to touch here in the dark. Your touch comes without expectation, without rhythm. Moments later, the music shifts and I realize that my eyes have closed, an unnecessary instinct. I hear you at my back now, your mouth and breath at my neck. My chest arches the way my body knows to do. No one has touched me so casually since my surgery, the cysts taken off my ovaries and my belly stitched closed. It hasn’t been a month yet, but I easily pass as a whole body.
The heat of your breath at my shoulder blades, the pressure of open lips on skin. Is this what it means to consent? My eyes are wet and weak and I forget already what the choreographer said to do if you suddenly didn’t want it—the touch. Your breath dampens my ear. I think, this is probably good for me. A voice comes from somewhere inside me about medicine and what I deserve, what I need that I don’t know about. I'm not very far away from the laparoscopy and the post-ops—or from the years before that, when it was not actually painful, and then it was; when it was nameless, then it was endometriosis. I know this voice well, the one that says other people know better about the clumping mystery of my body than I do. I’ve had tissue taken off me that was where it wasn’t supposed to be. I’ve had things surgically taken while I was under anesthesia, sleeping while decisions got made inside me, others cutting in as in doctor knows best.
The lights come on slowly, and I look down at the floor. My eyes uncomfortably adjust to how much I can see. I want to see your face, and I regret that this matters to me, that I feel I need to know its contours in order to know whether I am okay with your kissing my neck, with your mouth below my hair. I'm not supposed to want to know your nose, your lashes, here in this place where we are meant to be abandoning the eyes, letting vision go for the sake of other senses. I want to see you because I don’t know what your touch means on me. Opened by medicine a few weeks ago, I feel shaky still, not knowing what to expect at my edges, not knowing when it is reasonable to say no. My scars are still rough and rippled in the night. I’ve walked my slow post-surgery walk looking decidedly at the ground so that no one will ask me why this young body walks sluggishly, so that no one will make demands. I am unsure what tenderness I am allowed to feel. I am confused about exactly where I am closed and open. Still.
The kids these days ask for consent too much, a friend said to me earlier. She tells me a 22-year-old lover asked her too many times is this okay, now is this okay, is this? She says it was infuriating to answer again and again, that she knows herself and that he should trust this.
I say yes, how frustrating it is when the flow is broken, but how it also depends on the body receiving the question. I think of different bodies, bodies we see and immediately identify as differently-abled, differently reactive to touch. My little sister: people notice her difference right away. She's twenty-nine but moves her body like a child.
She occasionally tells me about strangers she meets at the bus stop who come too close too fast, who forcibly put their numbers in her phone and—once—their arms around her, strangers who can read on her face that she says "no" differently, and that it might take her a while. It makes her seem friendly. She believes that people talking to her are just talking and does not get suspicious like many of us would. My sister’s difference makes her an easy target.
I am usually the opposite, quickly stepping away from any stranger, holding my backpack to my chest, ending the conversation. But tonight it’s different, my soft body in a chair, responding ever-so-slowly, ever-so-foggily as you circle me. There’s just enough light in the theater now to see you moving objects around. Something silver and glittery in your hands makes a partial-image cross my eyes. I decide not to bother. I close my eyes again. I hear the sound of the object you are moving, first around your own body and then around mine as you whip it across my lap. I stifle a cough—maybe dust flying, or fear, or a sense of responsibility. Something that feels and sounds like tinsel catches on my belt loop and stays.
Light returns fully to the theater. I am sweaty and confused. Your body one of those bowing, my limbs stiff as I walk away without mingling. Other people’s bodies seem to agree with one another in the room; they return to drinking and thinking about the physical only as an abstraction. My body fails to comply, joints stiff, thighs stuck to one another in the heat. I am still stuck somewhere: stuck thinking about you, stuck feeling my insides. Stuck again to something I am not allowed to see.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leora Fridman is a writer whose work is concerned with issues of identity, assimilation, care, ability, and embodiment. Within and across these frames, she writes on books, art, and human stories. She's author of My Fault, selected by Eileen Myles for the Cleveland State University Press First Book Prize, in addition to other books of prose, poetry and translation. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Millions, Open Space, Speculative Nonfiction, and New Life Quarterly, among others. She’s currently based in Mexico City, where she is a Fulbright research fellow. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Header photograph by @I.am_nah
