SOMATIZATION

Editorial Content Warning: This story contains religious commentary.

The first time I danced I was by myself and it was past midnight and I had just woken up from what I remember as having been a very deep sleep and it was the dead of winter. All of the lights in my bedroom were off. There were two of them. The lights. I knew it was past midnight because the flashing red numbers on my bedside table’s alarm clock said so. I had made dance-like motions before, but it wasn’t until this night that I learned the difference between making dance-like motions and actually dancing. I don’t know why I did, but immediately after waking I sat up in my bed and looked around my room and saw a slant of moonlight configuring a glowing trapezoid on my weathered hardwood floor. And tiny motes falling slowly in the moonbeam. I threw my covers aside so hard that they fell off the other side of the bed. I got out to go and look out of my window, or it was more like I had to—that while I was sleeping I inexplicably became lighter than air and was thrust through reality by a force beyond my control. Like oil rising to the top of water. As I walked barefoot on the hard and cold hardwood floor I raised my arms into the air and they sort of made strange swimming motions. Though I really felt like I was just watching them glide and writhe as if the arms I was watching were not my own. I stepped into the moon’s trapezoidal spotlight feeling the grime from the unswept floor attach itself to my soles and make my feet a little slippery and looked out of the window at the trees and bushes and grass that were all covered in at least a half a foot of glittery snow. Above the treeline there was a full moon that I remember as having been the third full moon in three nights straight. I had noticed it both nights prior and can verify that it was the same one as if the same night had been repeating itself over and over until something that was supposed to happen happened. And there was not a cloud in the sky either, so I could see Orion and Taurus without having to squint. I saw my specular image’s eyes in the windowpane and struggled to accept that they were actually the eyes of Hunter Whitelock, teacher of sixth-grade social studies at Callahan Middle School, the same ones I looked into when I studied my teeth in the mirror as I flossed the evening before. And the same ones I’d been seeing in mirrors forever. I stood there in the third full moon in three night’s light and danced for the first time in my life. My arms moved like the necks of ostriches, my fingers made motions like they were plucking a harp, my hips rotated like a wobbling bowl, and my legs skulked like a predatory cat’s. My vertebrae twisted centepedishly. My face morphed between different expressions that I had only seen previously on ancient theater and burial masks in museums. As soon as I started I wondered what took me so long and why I hadn’t sooner. Maybe I couldn’t have sooner, one possible theory that I’ve postulated about my experience is that there must be some metaphysical dial that regulates the way that I move through space and time and that when I was born in Greeley twenty-nine years ago the dial had been knocked slightly askew by God if a god exists and since then I had been living as a slightly incomplete version of myself like I was slightly transparent but mostly there or just missing one tiny piece. And that night, for whatever reason, God came around and happened to notice that the dial was a little off and finally came along and turned it by a single notch and then bang, the piece fell into place. I became one hundred percent opaque and found myself moving through space and time in a way that I should have been my whole life. The rock-like disposition that I had been known for among my students disintegrated. I became liquid. I rode on the current of time. Whatever fit of pandiculation that I had experienced passed after a short while and when it did I noticed by the clock that twelve minutes or so had passed and found myself again standing in the middle of the trapezoid and staring out of the window at the snow covering the trees and bushes and grass glinting the third-full-moon-in-three-nights-straight’s light like a thousand shimmering diamonds strewn about my backyard.

Henry Romain was born in Wyoming, grew up in Iowa, and studies English with an emphasis in Creative Writing at USC. His favorite writers are David Foster Wallace and Herman Hesse. Outside of writing, his favorite hobbies are playing kendama, rock climbing, and just existing. You can follow Henry on Instagram here.