Not about tango

7^th August

It’s the ninth anniversary of my mother’s death, and I keep telling my friends I think I’m having the worst summer I’ve had since that one, back in 2017. I’m not sure saying it out loud so much is helpful; I’m suspicious of making things worse than they already are by speaking them into existence. The details of the last few weeks are cliché and obvious and won’t be outlined here, but I feel simply like life has beaten the shit out of me. I don’t really know how anyone is meant to withstand it, least of me; if I ever knew how to be hardy and resilient I’ve long forgotten it. People keep asking me how I am and I say I don’t know. I haven’t danced for a fortnight, I think, having been too busy, and I want to get back to it and feel strong again, and forget things.

This last week I’ve been in Cambridge, eating dumplings and drinking raspberry caipirinhas and spending time with people I love very much, and teaching at a summer school on an author I know almost nothing about. Each morning I wake up at 4 or 5am with anxiety and bad thinking, then traipse across the city before 7am, read half of or occasionally the entirety of the novel I’m teaching that day, manage two classes until midday then am released until the following morning. I feel like a student again, and can just about manage it, alarmingly: I drink too much in the evenings, cram scattered preparation between social commitments, and find – as I always do – that when it comes to teaching reading it is as natural and purposeful to me as it ever was. I don’t envy the city in the way I used to, it seeming really too small, a backwater or just ‘North Essex’, as a wise, clever man once called it. I’m grateful for the week away, and the distraction, but fretful for my deranged sleep and the impact it will have on two upcoming weeks of bitty, early-morning tutoring and grim teaching prep. I had better find a way to stabilise myself, and know tango will probably play a part in that, though only as part of a network of other actions. Loving dancing means knowing it will not always touch the sides.