His name was Isadora, and I could not say what or who was on that stage when he performed. Neither man nor woman who spun and spun beneath those lights, all in white, like a flittering moth whose life too soon was gone before it had begun.
He hated me at first. I was everything he was not. Woman, fair and elegance, effortlessly demure. But it was I who wore my heart on a sleeve begging to be torn. And when I fell from the ladder and he caught me in his arms, it was the gaze of fascination that set the precursor for a breaking heart.
Art drove us further apart. I, into the embrace of an adoring society. Besieged me with fame once reserved for her, my young lover turned to the arms of a man more mischievous, more perverse and with a passion I could never find raw enough within me.
She was only ever a woman in his arms. I saw her not as my lover but as a rival then. When the clothes that draped her frame too loosely came off beneath a candlelight. I held my breath when beholding her sight.
Woman, just like me. And the face that I knew dark, broody with the capricious qualities of a dandy, bore ecstasy of surrender, feminine in his embrace.
I bit my lip and swallowed back tears of jealousy. My lover, my enemy, my sister, my friend...
here was an art form none of her audience would ever, could ever see. How the light of the candle flicks across her nipples, wet from his mouth and erect. He drips wax over the rest of her and revels like a demon when she moans.
His lips, full. With straight teeth, a gap in the middle. His mustache pressed against her smooth lips as he slipped his tongue in. Her jawline seemed to have disappeared altogether when matched to his frame. Her shoulders delicate and supple as he bent her body this way and that. She, all too eager and ready to comply and submit.
Did she ever feel this way for me, when we made love?
Sick with anguish but still I kept on looking. We, with the same parts, the same sex whispering poetry against each other, vocalized and raw. I ached to match her in intensity, but beneath the flames of her heat, I always found myself wilting away.
If I, adored by society, by this transitory fame. She had at least both the love of a man and a woman. That could never be matched.
No dance could ever be performed with the same veracity as the act of love in surrendering.
Is dying. Is heart break. Is the letting go.
No dance, no man or woman, no frame of portrait. Nostalgia has always been the memory of what two eyes bore when looking back at the soul of another, and recognizing the eternal mirroring of your true heart's desire. All within an iris, speaking without language. Understanding without intellect.
Love is found not in the eyes, but in the beholding.