Cannoli
16th June
I’ve been eating a lot of cannoli recently, big ones with chocolate chips and little strips of orange at either end – they vividly remind me of living for a month in Florence, many years ago now, when I’d stop to buy one on the way back from language school each day. I haven’t really known what’s going on for the last week, and still don’t, in the possible throes of what may yet be my fourth break-up of some kind in the last eighteen months. I really don’t think I deserve it. I know it’s bad because all I can do is walk; at night up to Hampstead, in the mornings always down to the river; I keep trying to start work on a new essay, but it doesn’t seem to really want to take off yet, and I can’t muster the fission for it. I try to look out for myself, with sweet freddo cappuccinos from the Greek place on Exmouth Market, and also with dancing, which is both a mechanism for coping and caring.
I’ve danced the last four nights, and the Sunday and Monday nights of last week. It’s nice to come back to places and partners I’ve had to miss; nice to feel appreciated. One of my favourite leaders asks me for two vals tandas on the Sunday, and last night I have a tanda with a leader I haven’t seen since I went off to America. Tango makes me laugh, too – I’ve been dancing with a new-ish guy, who claims to work as a DJ (?); who spent four months over the Winter skiing in Europe (??); who tells me he’s bought ten vintage cars for fixing up in the last two weeks (???); and that WiFi is killing the bees (????). Like, yeah, okay. I think I’m having to face up to the fact, evidenced by my swift return to tango at the slightest sign of pain in my personal life, that I do find the tango communities I’m part of sustaining and supportive, for all they are populated by bizarre characters. Who says I am any better. Maybe if there were nothing wrong with us no-one would be dancing at all.
But who could have predicted, really, that doing a big, sad, old dance would help when you are feeling sad? Or that focusing only on your whole weight, on one hip over one foot on the floor, and what to do with it, would ground you when you feel adrift and thrown out into the world anew again?