A traveler joined a Jewish and Turkish man talking over tea at the Bursa silk market in an exquisite stone Caravansary.
“I lost today,” said the Jewish man.
“What do you mean," said his friend. “You made 3,000,000 Lira.”
“Yes, but I lost one day.”
Relaxed, he asks what I dream about. My imagination, perception and sensation means scrubbing cloth, wringing out water, hanging cloth on hangers, ironing cloth, folding cloth, bagging cloth, weighing cloth, handing cloth to strangers, accepting money, smiling and dreaming of freedom. I dream dance.
He traces my forehead, breasts, and jealous thighs. He dreams I have a real life with real opportunities. Courage. Self-esteem. Freedom. Dignity. He takes me far away from here. We escape to a beach. I see silent crashing blue and white waves. Feeling the sun on my face I smell the sea. I run into blue/white water shouting The Sea! The Sea!
I wear a long white cotton dress. It feels invisible on my skin. I am brown and content. I am free. He memorizes my small brown hands, heart, head and lifelines. They are heavy deep real and calloused from laundry. He is gentle with me. I am a hungry animal. I release my repressed sexual energy. I trust him. I give myself to him.
I am a slave. He cannot save me. This is an unpleasant fact.
Edging my skin realizing sensations, I feel safe and protected. I curl into his arms.
Without words I say my family is poor. There is no chance for us. He’s been in country long enough to know how my culture works.
My father is seventy-three and ill. I have numerous aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and abandoned relatives. They smell money when they see a white face. They beg for money with fake reasons. They play their woe is me sympathy card. They are traditional and narrow-minded. They suffer from ignorance, envy and jealousy and want.
Desire and greed is their master. I told them Thorny is my benefactor. Thorny thinks I was abused as a child. He found a doctor to assess my condition. They said it was too late to do anything to help me. My life is more silent laundry.
Thorny talked to my father using an interpreter. Thorny asked specifics - was she abused? Father said I wasn’t abused. Was she hit in the head as a child? Did she suffer from a head injury? No, no, no, my father said. He said something happened to me when I was two.
I think they are afraid of Thorny and don’t want to tell him the truth. He flew home for three months. He plans to come back and get paperwork so I can leave and join his family in OZ. Fat chance. My luck ran out.
I don’t hold my breath. I dance.
I exhale my dancing quest. I showed my lover and he’s happy for me. If it’s possible, he signed. He knows my father has to approve any relationship with Thorny depending on cash amount. Marriage is a big maybe like my sister did.
If my family agrees they determine a pre-paid wedding dollar amount, say $3 grand. There’s a pre-nuptial waiting period, filing government papers. Pay greasy greedy officials. The government requires foreigners to prove they make $2,500 a month. Everyone here has a hand out. A wedding party will cost $200-$5,000 to impress friends with our social status. Big deal.
My father is afraid to lose me. He will say no. My lazy sister needs a slave. This is my fate. I am happy. It’s all I’ve known, know now and will know.
My life dance is ambiguity, poetry, acceptance, independent detachment and creative imagination. Dance is isolated yet cooperating and independent. I believe in the magic of dance.
When you dance, for a fleeting moment, you feel alive.
What do I see? I see a circle of movement, a connected unity, language in space. There are five rhythms in dance. You start with a circle. It’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth. Then you have a line from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.
Chaos is next, a combination of circle and lines where male and female energies interact. This is the place oftransformation. After chaos is the lyrical. A leap. A release. This is air. The last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.
I’ll dance until I die.
Dance is motivated by emotional expression. Dance is about itself. Dance is a free playful existence. Life is a silent dance.
My spirit is destined for obscure happiness. Dancing my existence I regain incentive, communicating with gestures. My beauty. Symmetry. I am a formless form in a world of forms. Skin textures are perfect. Complete. My life is pure essence. Radiant. I dance with energy and freedom.
I am free. Clear. Pure. Luminous.
When you dance you are connected to the source. I am the source, the vast self. My lack of speech and hearing is a blessing. I am grateful. My body is my instrument. I am a golden sprite, a fairy maiden. I am a young, innocent, shy, ferocious wild tiger. My claws feel this intensity. I lie down with death.
My needs are met on every level of being. It is sensual, playful.
I gesture to him. Go upstairs. Shhh.
I lock the door. We are safe. I am safe. I take off my clothes. My dance flows love. My childlike love caresses air. It is the stillness of dance, my free form.
Touch me. Nibble my ear lobes. Kiss my neck. Use your tongue. Ask me without words if I want it gentle, medium or hard.
I lie down. Hold me. Breathe deep. Exhale eighteen inches out. Deep space. Empty your mind. Feel our bodies. Give me a full body massage. Start with my feet. They are erogenous zones of pleasure. Touch pressure points on my souls. My brain is an erogenous zone. Work up my calves massaging lower back, along the spine expanding out across upper back muscles and shoulders. My neck muscles are tight from doing laundry. Knead tension out. I’ll tell you how it feels with gestures of pleasure.
Listen and feel my body. Hear my breath exhaling sensation. Roll me over. Let your tongue do the talking. Stimulate me slow and easy as I feel your tongue caress ear lobes and neck, across breasts. Caress aroused purple nipples. Move south across my belly. Clear the department of the forest before tonguing my little button and labia rose. It’s highly sensitive. Slow. This is a powerful erogenous spot. Explore my blood filled flowers. Tongue lips deeper. Inhale my fragrance.
Feel my response as I move with you. Dance with me. Explore my mysterious cave with a slow moving tongue. Feel my response. Hear my breathing. If it’s fast and shallow I’m excited. I press your face deeper into my forest getting what I need.
My body is your teacher.
I am alone in my silent prison. It is a blessing and a curse. It confines me and it liberates me.
Silence is everything. I am one with everything. A singularity.
All visual colors, sensations, perceptions, forms, symbols, imagination and energies of transient tactile existence permeate my being.
Everything floats away. Mu. Nothing. Maya. Illusion. Suffering is an illusion. I don’t understand suffering. Does suffering mean experiencing taste, sound, temperature, and texture feeling regret, loss and a death of the spirit? I witness sad lost blank faces. People wear sadness like discarded rags. I see mouths moving.
I never hear laughter as I pass through life with my Dream Sweeper Machine.
What does laughter sound like?
What color is sound?
This is my Beauty. Fear and trust dance in stillness. I meditate. Calm. Centered.
I am a stone cold Apsara silent dancer dancing with my revolutionary evolutionary soul.
I feel like screaming.
The dancing hall inside the Preah Khan temple at Angkor Wat is where dancers don’t smile. They dance. They are slave dancers. They dance for the king. The god-king. He resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, family, harvests, seasons, sun and moon.
They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. A celebration of tranquility is their eternal dance. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. Diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.
I dance to escape the tyranny of life. I use my dance to express life. I’ve danced all my short, sweet existence.
The Hall of Dancers has laterite columns and portals with broken jumbled green mossy stones. Stones whisperdance. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots below the surface of appearances in deep burial crypts crawl toward dancers. They dance through exposed roots, past Shiva and Vishnu, the preserver and destroyer of life.
My gratitude is stillness. There is a big difference between sitting still and doing nothing.
The hardest thing to do in life is to do nothing with intention as it takes the most out of you as a person mentally and physically.
Some people say nothing exists. I do nothing everyday.
I smell roses. I swallow fresh orange juice. I engage my senses in direct, immediate, raw, emotional experience. He cannot save me from my destiny. He can only allow the process to flow.
One day he brought me apples, oranges and mangoes. He spoke with non-speech. He imagines our passion is a glimmer of potential emotional security in the long now. Inside my deep-eyed mischief, strangers comfort each other without discrimination.
I am a singularity.
Sensing passion we decipher riddles forecasting speechless tongues. We accept mindfulness with gratitude in quicksilver’s desperate wandering. Boredom carves a niche in my soul.
He is a Lone Wolf with a variant of DNA comprehending my inherent instinctive needs. I hang laundry near the street.
Memory’s lie is tempered by talking monkeys. Two boys harvest trash. One barefoot boy plays silent music with a long thin bamboo fiber. The other carries a plastic bag, twirling a walking stick used for prodding garbage.
Local people mill around. Milling around is an art form. They exist with a pure innocent childlike wisdom. Passive is their inherent Buddhist nature. They’ve suppressed their ego. Ease god out.
Others voice imaginary alien freedom ideas. I am an Other. I live in my heart-mind luminous universe.
A sofa on wheels with a roof towed by a motorcycle carries fat white Europeans to see 9th century Angkor temples. A young handicapped man named Eternity wearing his new skin-tight artificial plastic left leg and foot shuffles through dust. He walks home. It is everywhere and nowhere. You can’t go home again.
I don’t know where the real ends and the artificial begins.
My lover-friend was away for six weeks. He brought me pineapples, a yellow mango and passion fruit. I washed clothes in my silent world. My hair tinted golden hued. I am ebullient. He touched my spine. Soft. I turned, smiling.
My silent world and calm joy are disguised potentials. We share a silent clear intention. Our private time contains no fear. It is a gentle passion, soft and slow. My awareness is trust and authenticity. I am resigned to remembering everything.
I paint my nails a shade of red-pink. My old thin brown fingers are tired after a day scrubbing clothes. My infinite silent no voice is all. He watches my intense angelic face focus on nails. One-by- one. My heart understands his sense of eternal loss.
I sign: I hate the French spies next door. He and his fat wife run a restaurant. He spies for Thorny. They are creeps. Before he left Thorny gave me money to stop doing massage. I agreed. The spies keep an eye on me.
In my silence only my voice is missing.
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