I have a new hobby. I dance in hospitals.
Not only hospitals: the street, the bus stop, walking through security to the hospital. Walking through security and back home. A home. These are my haunting grounds; I dance in them all.
It started yesterday, as I was waiting for the bus to the hospital, after touring the hospice. That was a day after I went to my mother’s grave on my own, for her 13th yahrzeit, and also scouted plots for my father. That was a day after I woke up at 3 a.m., sobbing uncontrollably—sobbing like I was throwing up—my face doing a thing I did not ask it to do. Once, when Ella was two and had suddenly thrown up, she looked up at me and asked, “Why did I do that?” It was like that. My face couldn’t stop for a few hours, and I watched it, curiously, from the inside. Eventually, it stopped, and I slept a little. But that’s when I realized I had to let my face do what it wanted during the day so I could get some sleep.
That was a day after I organized my father’s hospice transfer, figured out how he wanted to be buried—how he wanted to die—talked to him about his fears, reassured him he wouldn’t suffer, that we would be with him, that I would miss him terribly—that I loved him—touched his aching, lonely body, rigged his tablet so he could work without moving his broken neck, started editing the poems for his book—some of them full of anger toward me and my kin; all heartbreakingly beautiful—spoonfed him like I never did my children, reassured him I could change him like I did my children, cyberstalked tattoo artists that could etch the scar that’s on my heart onto my flesh.
The one that reads אור—Light—the root of both my parents’ names. I want it—I need it—on the outside too.
That was a day after I left the hospital in the evening, at the end of a long day, and found myself funneled by a rallying mob to the square of my youth, staring up at the apartment I grew up in—still furious that someone else thought they could live there—crying and crying and crying in the rain. Eventually, I got on a bus home. A home.
That was a day after I landed in my forsaken homeland in the middle of the night and had to ask an old friend to pick me up from the airport because no one would just naturally do that anymore, and the thought of arriving in the middle of the night to a place that was once my home, that is no longer my home, that will always be my not-home—where my father is dying and my mother is already dead—was just too much. I got up in the morning and went to the hospital and couldn’t stop kissing his body, this body that would once hoist me over his shoulders but is now just skin and bones.
So yesterday, I started dancing. It’s either that or crying. Most of the time, it’s both. You wouldn’t believe how transgressive an act this is—how radical. More transgressive than my hairy legs. Dancing in the hospital corridor, dancing at the bus stop.
It’s not performative—I just can’t help it anymore. Not if I don’t want my face to do that thing at 3 a.m. again. It’s healing—not only because it lets my body do what it wants, not only because of the repetition that calms my nervous system, not only because it lets my freak flag fly—but mostly because it embodies the dissonance between the normal and the abnormal: life as it continues on the street and this absolute nonsense of my parent dying in agony, again; of me being here alone, again; of time stopping while everything somehow keeps on going, again. I want it—I need it—to show on the outside, too.
So I dance. I dance to this song my sister sent me, and I can’t stop dancing to it. It’s only 2 minutes and 30 seconds long, so it’s like Groundhog Day for my nervous system. I dance in short bursts while I wait for the elevator, when I get into my father’s room. I stretch into this new creature I’m becoming, my hair turning white in clumps. I feel each strand turning, I feel my skin tingling, I feel the metamorphosis.
I’m a little worried my children won’t recognize me when I get back home. My home. That I’ve forgotten how to smile.
My sister says smiling is unavoidable. I take her word for it.
I am becoming something new.
Something old.
All of the Worlds 