Find your nearest corner
feel it drop in your cheeks.
I am not a dancer.
Roll your body into the shape you left in your mother.
My feet fall asleep. quickly.
The dissonance of not knowing how to move my body. It does not bend as easily as yours.
How do you move so freely? Is your head not filled with a million other thoughts cycling.
always.
Fold like a rock face, that has been eroding for millions of years.
Why am I staying so attached to “moving”.
Look at someone across the room. Their face hangs in a bedroom you visited for a moment three years ago.
You have moulded your mind to the curves of their face before you had ever said “hello”.
I am not a dancer. But if you take me to a place where there is music and light, my hips will take care of
themselves. I am free to caress my own hair and feel nothing.
Build a bridge.
Sit like a child that has not yet learnt their spacial awareness. We are supposed to be thrown as children so
that our brain learns how to be in space.
Are you at the ballroom? Or is this netball? I see no difference in the way we dart around, throwing our
hands in the air.
this. feels. sporadic.
She was on the floor and it reminded me of sleeping on play mats as a child. I do not remember why I was
sleeping on play mats. It is a satellite memory. Regardless stay there with that untethered feeling.
Taken straight from dancing: lean your head in the nook of their back. Does this make you feel like
home? I lie awake at night and imagine a ghost beside me. Unfamiliar, tracing my curves. This is
never actualised, even when this space was filled.
Laugh. uncomfortably.
Come back to the play mats. You are a child once more. Put on your favourite
costume and dance with a blanket in each hand. Always end on the floor.
You rest your heads together. How does it feel to be that close to someone?
(post reading)
You are all twirling, it is beautiful and I am a voyeur.
I cannot hear my own voice.
Move between solitude and the cradling of another.
Slide along the floor towards someone familiar, second bring what came before. Watch as their face
scrunches.
These are all doing words.
There is a cut beneath my thumb nail that is infected. It prevents me from opening
and closing the safety pin on my pants. It is an unseen pain like what must be the
remnants of a bruise on my left hip. The skin looks fine.
What is it you feel before a crush? Tenderness? That is how I feel when I look at you, unfamiliar
tenderness.
Lean your nose to my shoulder. This closeness will make the small person within me jump.
Line up like girls in bed for a slumber party; before the time when sleeping over became reserved for
drunkenness or sex. Or drunken sex.
Run your finger under your chin, where it meets your neck. Repeat. Repeat again. No one has been
there in a long time.
This text was originally written as a part of Lydia Connolly-Hiatt’s performance Their Body and Other Tales
with Talia Rothstein, and residency at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute 2019.