In Prose: Moving Bodies Through Space

Artwork by Candace La

by Anonymous

| Quarantine |

There’s a certain gem of an insight produced during this time of claustrophobia. Open your computer, type ‘Under Pressure’ by Queen into YouTube, and rock out in your living room where you have been shut in for the past three weeks and think of yourself as a beautiful, sparkling diamond.

You are the gem. 

It is said our mentality shrinks or expands proportional to the space we occupy. I have felt this, cloistered away in my squat little dorm room like a modern-day monk, my eyes and my thoughts never breaking beyond the margins of an open faced book or the black bezels of a screen, pacing round-trips back-and-forth between the two, long into the dim hours of the night. 

I have felt this, staring at Arizona skies. 

Dissolving the Earth’s curve, endless blues above melding endless reds below.

Pouring myself,                                                                                                                                 

                            fulfilling the breadth –    

                                                                      a primordial fury was drawn from my depths. 

 In the deluge, I 

was lost.

Space is relative. No definition of its continuity, no end no beginning, only we have designed to mark it so, with walls. With roads. With soil. 

With even a changing of our own bodies. 

We, waking in our little brick-and-mortar boxes to drive around in even littler metal boxes to work in multi-celled boxes to arrive back home to lay our heads down on soft boxes; we choose to orient ourselves by illusory limitation. The opposition of confinement against expanse is easily established on the daily.

Yet just when we cease to enact our ritual demarcations, the opportunity appears for reinterpretation of the areas we inhabit. Through innovating ways of interacting with space, we are reminded of its relativity that the Italian apartment balcony may stage as much beauty as the largest ballroom.

A human body is nothing but fluid; it acts according to universal laws of physics and it moves via osmosis. We desire to occupy the void before us because we must displace the concentration of ourselves, 

there is too much of us here  

and not enough of us over there.

Be without fear of small spaces, then. Your dancing limbs will overflow your confines through extended expression your self-condensed feeling will disperse to balance the empty surroundings in your tiny room, as you, tinier dancer, teeter on the tips of your toes to equilibrium. 

I, too, am reminded of putting on a rumba to pass a cold, lonely winter in my dormitory. That room, barely big enough to turn two times down lengthwise, would not have fit more than one moving body, but I danced as if it could.