Page 86 of Wreckage and Rain

"My brain writes books for a living. It doesn't shut up."

He walks to the sound system. Plays my song. Slow. Bass-heavy. A woman singing about burning down a house she built and watching the fire from the lawn.

"Close your eyes. Don't count. Just move."

I close my eyes. Without the mirror, without the counting, without my writer's brain trying to direct, my body finds the rhythm on its own. The transition happens naturally.

I open my eyes. Sam is watching me in the mirror. The expression on his face.

I stop.

"Don't stop."

"You're looking at me like..."

"Like you're extraordinary? Get used to it."

The music. The studio. Sam at the back wall where he always ends up, watching me run the number for the ninth time. And I'm still outside it. Still counting. Still watching myself do it instead of doing it. I stop in the middle of the eight-count. Drop my hands.

"I can't get out of my head. I've been stuck in it all day." I don't have to explain the rest to him. "Get me out."

He knows exactly what I'm asking. He pushes off the wall and crosses the floor. He goes to the board and brings the house lights down to almost nothing and brings the music up until it's the only thing left in the room.

"Here's the rule," he says. "You don't perform it. There's no one to perform it for. The mirror goes behind you, I turn my back, and you move because your body wants to move, not because anybody's clocking whether you hit the mark. Eyes closed if it helps. I'll tell you when three minutes is up."

"You're going to turn around."

"I'm going to turn around. This one isn't mine to watch. It's yours to feel." He turns and faces the brick, hands in his pockets, the least interested-looking man in Chicago. "Whenever you're ready. Or not. We can stand here all night. I've got nowhere to be."

So I close my eyes.

Everything in the room goes. The woman I've been watching in the glass for two months, managing, checking, correcting, goes. There's only the bass coming up through the floor into the soles of my feet, and the dark behind my eyes, and a man with his back to me who promised not to look.

I move.

Not the steps so much as what the steps were always reaching for. My hips find the count without me telling them where it is. My spine remembers what my brain keeps trying to control. I stop landing the marks and start meaning them. Somewhere in the second minute I stop being a woman performing a number and start being a body that is, after all of it, still alive, still mine, still allowed to take up the exact amount of room it wants and not one inch less. I let the fuck go.

I'm crying by the end, and for once it isn't from grief. It's from the shock of finding something alive in me I was sure had died.

The track ends. I open my eyes.

Sam is still facing the brick. He kept it. He didn't watch a second.

"You didn't look."

"You didn't need me to look. You needed to stop needing the mirror." He turns around, and his face is easy, and he doesn't make a thing of it. "For the record, that's the number. Not the one you've been drilling. The one nobody was allowed to see. Pull that off with two hundred people in the room Saturday and you're going to wreck somebody's whole evening."

I laugh, wet and caught off guard.

We both slide down to the floor, backs against the cold mirror.

"I think about him every day," I say.

"Of course you do. It would be weird if you didn't."

"I hate that I do."

"You loved him for eight years. That doesn't stop. The question is whether you can separate who he was from what he did."