The wooden floors of the dance studio hold the energy of a long day. But it is not warm to the touch with passion where Nanighi touches it. Rather, his fingers graze the grain and feel a sharp, ice-like electrical pulse.
Nanighi’s first death had come and gone. He was expected to keep living as normal; to cook dinner for himself, to drink tea every morning as usual, to smile at his friends, Átuadi and Areyda.
And of course, he does those things, but he also winces as he stands from any chair, and his knees cannot carry his weight for as long as they used to. He gets out of bed with loose joints that can’t hold any sort of pressure. His limbs refuse to stay in place.
He is young, only twenty-five, but you never know what Olodumare will bring you.
So, when his health began to fail rapidly, something new around the corner that was ready to bring him to his knees with every passing day… Nanighi knew his first death was fast approaching: the day he would dance for a final time, without ever being able to do it again.
It began slowly, at first he couldn’t dance every day, but he could still dance for hours when he did. However, after a few months, the three hours he’d rather be dancing would organically be stopped short after one and a half, when some joint or muscle somewhere gave in a way it shouldn’t have. From there, it was never ending exhaustion; it was pain at every turn; it was the inability to be a stable worker at his day job.
When Areyda and Átuadi asked about dance, Nanighi couldn’t find a timeline for how he had died. He could only tell them that he had. When the subject of dance arrived at all, Nanighi found himself beginning to cry. Darangilaü, Areyda’s daughter, was a brilliant kid. When Nanighi was still dancing, they would dance together in front of the television in Areyda’s house. Nanighi was always so proud of her – she was a lot like him, Uncle Nanighi. She mastered the arabesque and grande jete on her first tries. A memory that sticks out to Nanighi, like a painful splinter you cannot see, was when he went to see Darangilaü’s first ballet performance after he had died for the first time. Areyda refused to tell him what Darangilaü was dancing, wouldn’t even hint at her role. And as the curtain raised and the music began, Nanighi understood. He immediately began to weep. Because while it was only a kids’ recital, for the dancers around 12 and 13, Darangilaü had gained a role that Nanighi had always wished to dance. Odette in Swan Lake. As a young boy, before body parts and gender and expression had any real meaning, Nanighi had longed desperately to play Odette. And then, as he aged and more inclusive troupes began to form, he believed he could one day do so. Don the tutu and all. But no longer was that a reality. So, while he felt the most immense pride he had ever felt watching Darangilaü dance so gracefully, he still ached knowing he could never do the same.
Every day was empty. Pure emptiness. The other joys of life, now joyless. A good sandwich was not satiating, the summer breeze felt something like nothing, the sun warming his flesh still left him cold.
He reminisced every day of what he had wished for as a boy. To be Clara in The Nutcracker, no matter that he was a boy. To dance Odette in Swan Lake, because Act 2, No. 10 was his favourite song in the suite. Come high school, it was to be a back-up dancer to someone famous. He, himself, did not want to be someone famous. Rather, he wanted to dance among like-minded people and move with the grace and power they all did, to command a space with his body movements. Then he ached to be a choreographer, because his obsessive attention to detail was exactly what dance was about. He doesn’t remember his first time dancing, but he knows that every time he began to move to a beat, it was like his soul was communing with Olodumare themself. To dance, to Nanighi, was to live. They were inextricable from one another. Dancing felt innate to Nanighi’s being. He did not have to be taught; he already had the skill. Every class he was in, he was the example. To lose the ability to dance was more devastating than any failure could be.
Now, there was no hope for any of the things he had dreamed of. The confidence he had once carried in his ability was left to become the dirt that travelled through dance studios on the shoes of others. He couldn’t dance, even on his best days, and those were far and few in between. His best days, those were spent cleaning what he could, working when able. His bad days – which were many – were spent largely in bed trying to sleep away the fear that he felt deep inside. The fear that, dying his first death meant he no longer cared about dying his second. The fear that dying his first death had endeared him to his second, final end.
And that fear led him to that cold room overfilled with mirrors he had once found his greatest love in. That fear led him to lay on his back and feel the wood with every inch of himself that he could. It led him to finally, finally break, and scream the anguish of his first death.