Reappearance

Tonight is the Porland English Country Ball, conveniently held in the Smith Memorial Student Union ballroom, which happens to be right across the Park Blocks from my apartment building. :) Jim is playing for the Ball, so he flew up yesterday and came to dinner (spicy pad thai, mmmmm....), then we went to the pre-ball English dance (not a rehearsal). There were a number of people there that I knew from either morris dancing or the Revels, and it was fun to see them again. It kind of made me sad in a way, though, to see how genuinely surprised everybody seemed to see me there. It was almost as if they had never expected to see me again, and possibly didn't really care if they didn't. Everybody seemed happy to see me, of course, but much more surprised - shocked, even - than I would have expected. I mean, it's not like I'm a regular English country dancer who hasn't shown up for a while - a lot of people just come for this once-a-year event. And I'm not in the Revels this year, so I don't naturally see those people (though they were less surprised than the morris folks to see me). It was like they thought I'd disappeared off the face of the earth and they never expected to see me again, so they'd given up on me. This despite the fact that I've been to see one of them several times at the library where she works, and sent two of them happy-birthday-how-are-you-let's-catch-up emails that were never returned. I don't know if there's some larger social phenomenon going on here (read: Hugo), or if they would have given me up for lost on their own.

This “reappearing act” was a strikingly different experience for me than what I normally encounter in the other dance situation in which I occasionally reappear from nowhere: namely, Stanford. In that case, I really did kind of disappear from the face of the earth (or at least, from the Stanford bubble) when I moved to Portland, and people didn’t expect to see me show up at dances. But when I do show up once or twice a year, people are genuinely thrilled to see me – they’re surprised, yes, but in a more pleased way. … Or something. I can’t quite put my finger on it. They don’t expect to see me because they know I live far away, so it’s a treat for me to show up (and no, I don’t think I’m massaging my ego here). Here, on the other hand, it’s feeling like everybody has moved away from me, even though I’ve been in Portland the whole time, and they don’t expect to see me because they’ve given up on our friendship. I’ve pretty much been shut out from a community I used to love, which is hard. I know that this is in large part my fault, because I pretty much did disappear from the whole morris social scene rather abruptly, though under circumstances in which I didn’t feel I had much choice. But it still feels weird. At the moment I feel like I’m trying to rebuild bridges, but that those on the other side of the river would rather stay there.

In any case this weekend is proving to be an interesting lesson in stepping back and letting things be the way they will be. In happy news, I’ve met several very nice people in the last two days at the dance and Ball workshop, and I am still determined to enjoy myself tonight. I don’t have to disappear forever just because people think I have.


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Current Magnetic Poetry:

smile like a rose
prisoner of a beautiful morning
the scent
of a delicious sensual perfume
surrounding your heart
disappear into the sacred flower