You have never been able to sit alone in the darkness. At least never for any significant stretch of time. Your soul is bright, but you still flinch from the night when it tries to touch you. You hide from the shadows, the stillness and the quiet, using fire, music and song to keep them at bay. Always you try to distract yourself with some ritual or ceremony, performing for some great priest or king. Singing for them all through the night. Sleeping only at dawn. This is how afraid you are of what the night holds. This is how awfully terrified you are to be alone with your thoughts. Alone with all the nightmares and all the faces of the dead.

It is at one of these performances that you first notice him, the dancer. His skin is as dark as the blackness between the stars. At first, he seems like just another man. A man made of flesh and bone, blood and sinew, pain and dreams, like everybody else. But when he dances, it is as though all mundanity is shed from him, like the scales of a snake, and you quickly forget all these things. A hurricane in human form, his limbs and torso writhe and twist like harmattan winds. The drops of sweat on his supple, athletic form catching and reflecting the dazzling light like little, amber gemstones. His legs caked in dust from knee to toe. You watch, and you slowly forget that he is just a man. At least until the dancing stops.

When the ceremony is done, you approach the dancer, eager and desperate like a wanderer lost in the desert, stumbling towards a shimmering mirage. This was at the burial of a great king. The dancer had just finished dancing, frantic and primal, in the palace as dozens of virgin women were ritually sacrificed in the dead king’s name. The people of this land say that if this sacrifice is not done, the spirit of the king would never be allowed to join the ancestors. But you do not believe this, for you knew better. The dead have no hold on the living. Except the hold we grant them.

Without much hesitation or delay, you approach the dancer and begin to haggle with him, pretending, at least for that moment, that this was just a matter of the mind and not the heart. “We cross the lands, you and I. You dance and I sing, we share equally the gold coins and the cowries. What do you say?” The dancer looks you over with suspicious eyes, carefully pondering your proposition. Then he requests a song. He says that it is the beauty of the song that shall decide if he follows you or not. So, you sing. You peel yourself away like a skinned animal and you unfurl the tapestry of your inner heart for him to see—brutal, raw and unapologetic. You sing long and true, weaving the song with the threads of your very soul, and as you sing, it starts to feel like you are burning. Like you are shining so dazzlingly bright, yet wilting to ashes all at once. Your eyes locked on his through it all. Through the intoxicating agony of the tortured moment. His face as still as a lifeless statue as he attempts to mask how you have so deeply affected him. But this fails, for you see clearly the fire you’ve ignited in his eyes.

Moments later, he shrugs and makes a show of how unfazed he is. He pretends that you hadn’t just used your song to caress his soul, like he caressed yours with his dancing. “You sing like a woman,” the only words he has for you, a scalding rebuke, taunting. Words that sound more like an insult than anything else. Your heart on the verge of cracking before he finally adds, “… but yes, I will follow you.” This is enough.

From that day on, the two of you are inseparable. Your first moments with him, awkward and hesitant, like children learning the first steps of a new dance. But the more time you spend with him, the easier things become. Together you both travel, across scenic valleys and lush forests. To different lands and amongst strange people, using the song and dance as kindling to light a fire in all their hearts. With time, your renown grows, the wealth grows—all those rooms lit by flickering candles, overflowing with gold, silk, cowries and leopard skins. The things people paid you to make them feel. Yet in spite of all the riches and fame you received, you are never happy. For you lacked the one thing you ever really wanted—the dancer’s love. Absentmindedly, you wonder to yourself, how long you would be able to continue living like this. How long would you be able to live without telling him how you truly felt?

It ends up taking you ten years to muster up enough courage to confess. Ten long years of hoping and waiting. The terror of dying with this desperate secret overpowering any fear you may have of losing him. A lot had happened in the space of ten years. Ten years of wandering aimlessly through distant lands, singing for people in a language that they did not understand. Ten years of daring, near-death escapades. Ten years of wine and nocturnal revelries. You try and fail to remember when exactly this, your life of excitement and spectacle, had suddenly become so hollow, losing all its appeal. This life of wandering and adventure. With time, everything began to blur together, becoming indistinguishable and utterly bland. His body no longer what it once was. Your song no longer what it once was. Everything fading away, the restlessness growing.

When the dancer had lost his family to the sickly touch of Babalú-Aye, you’d witnessed as his grief shattered him into a thousand pieces. The fullness of their lives abruptly snatched up and dropped into the satchel of death as casually as a giggling child picks pebbles off the ground. You’d helped him put himself back together again, even though there were pieces of him that would always be missing. Pieces of him that were now forever lost with the spirits and the gods. Perhaps it was easier for you to heal him because you were no stranger to grief and loss. Now, after so much time, you again began to see parts of him that you could recognize.

The ocean winds blow gently as you both walk lazily on the beach. Two tired, weary souls, talking of things that are, were and could have been. You feel the wind gently caress your skin, your cloak, your hair. You look up into the sky and you see all the bright stars gradually disappearing with the coming dawn. The night, once an impenetrable, inky blackness, now receding into a bluish tinge. The stars are still beautiful, even if they are fading away. We are still beautiful, even if we are fading away. Even if time robs us of all brightness and lustre.

This feels right. You are convinced that this is the perfect moment. You are finally about to tell him how you feel. Finally, after all these years. Then he shouts, “Look! Look over there! Can you see that thing coming out of the water?” You know, even as you look, that the moment is shattered. You will have to wait for another time to confess. Some other day. Some other sunrise. You follow his finger and you see it. Something on the water. Even though a part of you doubted, you followed with your eyes and found something over there, just like he’d said. Impossible. This can’t be true.

During the course of your travels, you’ve sang for many great kings and visited more lands than most would ever get to see in several lifetimes. Yet in all your travels, never have you seen or heard of this thing that you now witness. A boat, larger than the loneliness of your soul, with slender trees sprouting from it. These slender trees held cloth that caught the wind. The ship grew ever larger as it drew closer to the shore. Close enough for you to see the creatures on the boat. In their silhouettes, you at first thought you had seen people, but when they drew closer, you also saw that their faces were the color of cow’s milk, of palm wine, or of white sand.

Startled, you instinctively take a few steps back. You feel conflicting emotions of fear and awe, like how you felt when you’d first seen a leopard in a hunter’s cage, when you were still a child, all those years ago. Suddenly, you are overcome with an irrational, maddening desire to run. But for some reason, you don’t. You just stand there, transfixed, watching the ship and the brightness of the dawn draw ever closer. At the time, you will not know this, but you will never again get another chance to tell the dancer how you feel. Your reality is about to change. Everything is about to change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Rafael Garcin on Unsplash