Currently it’s 3:33 in the morning, and I’ve been stuck behind this laptop at my aunt’s house in Tulsa for over an hour. Twice I’ve written an opening paragraph and deleted it, and I just moved from a chair in the living room to the floor hoping the change in location might will help. Physically, I’m both exhausted and over-stimulated. Emotionally, I’m the same. Tonight’s post–if and when I finish the damn thing–will be number one hundred. One hundred days of blogging in a row. Wow. That’s well over one hundred thousand words. That’s more than the first Harry Pottter. I feel like I should throw a party for myself, but then I probably wouldn’t get any writing done. I can’t think. I’m blaming the almost-full moon.

Oh my god, I finished a paragraph and didn’t delete it.

I’ve said this before, but almost every time I sit down to write, a theme becomes apparent. It’s as if there’s a single thread that somehow runs throughout each day’s random events, and my job is to find it, tug on both ends, and pull it all together. But on days like today, I feel like a seamstress (or is it seamster?) who’s looking at a pair of pants with too much material, wondering how I’m going to trim things down, make everything fit.

I came to Tulsa today for the wedding of my former dance partner Janie. When I opened my dance studio on September 25, 2005, Janie was one of the four people who showed up for my first group class. Her sister, Jennifer, had taken swing from me at a local fitness center, and that’s how Janie found out about the studio. Several years ago, Janie moved to Tulsa when she graduated college, but for years and years (and years) before that, Janie was at the studio–dancing–multiple times a week.

I really don’t know how to keep this brief. Janie and I made hundreds of YouTube videos together. We’ve performed together more times than I can count. In the process of learning aerials, I’ve literally been closer to Janie than I’ve ever been to any other woman in my entire homosexual life. We’ve picked each other up, dropped each other, laughed together, cried together. In my fifteen years of teaching dance, no one has been as talented, kind, light-hearted, trustworthy, or drama-free as Janie.

My date for the wedding tonight was my friend Marina, whom I met at a swing dance in Tulsa God-knows-how-many-years ago. One of the most fascinating people I know, Marina is a ninety-something, still-working, still-dancing local historian. She was an original Rosie the Riveter in the Boeing factory in Wichita in World War II. An inspector, she checked so many rivets that she’s missing fingerprints on two fingers. I like to think of her as my fairy godmother. Never short for stories, tonight Marina told me the factory she worked in was disguised to look like a farm, complete with plastic cows and hay bales that got moved around each night. She also said she used to tell her mom she was going to the library to study but instead would go to a gymnasium to teach soldiers how to swing dance.

Here’s a picture of Marina and me at the wedding with my friends Bruce and Lyn from Fort Smith. A long time ago I said something smart ass to Lyn, and she lightly popped me on the back of the head, so we started joking that I’d “better watch it,” maybe wear a hard hat whenever I’m around her. Anyway, tonight Lyn said she’d go easy on me, since I recently lost a game of real-life bumper cars.

Also at the wedding tonight were my dancer friends Joseph and Elisabeth. Elisabeth reads the blog regularly, and she’s the one who told me about The Artist’s Way, a book about creativity that’s currently doing to my emotions what the Tilt-A-Whirl does to the stomach of anyone over thirty-five. Anyway, Elisabeth said she read somewhere that the creative well never runs dry–basically, “there’s always more where that came from.” I remember, just earlier tonight, nodding my head in agreement, and then later staring at my blank laptop screen and thinking, bullshit.

Seeing Janie tonight was only a little weird. I guess it’s like that when you go a long time without seeing someone you used to be so close to. It felt like both nothing had changed and everything had changed. So often it was just the two of us practicing, rehearsing. But tonight the room was full of people, which made me realize I’m just a piece of Janie’s life, just like all those other people are, all of us pulled together by this one common thread.

What wasn’t weird–but rather what was wonderful–was dancing with Janie, someone I’ve danced with more than anyone else in the world. Nothing short of marvelous, being on the dance floor with Janie felt like falling into you favorite chair after a difficult day, like you’ve somehow gotten lucky and found a place where time doesn’t pass by.

Marina and I also danced. We shuffled our feet, rocked back on our heels, wagged our fingers at each other. (She refers to this sort of thing as “getting funky.”)

After the wedding, we go back to the house Marina’s lived in since 1955, the home she’s currently moving out of. Her living room empty, the kitchen is full of bills, newspaper clippings, some pictures of white-haired Marina in airplanes and helicopters. The inspector uniform she wore over seventy years ago hangs in the hallway. She still fits into it. Once when I said, “Marina, you must not have worked very hard–that thing isn’t even dirty,” she rolled her eyes and said, “They gave us a new one every week.”

Marina tells me that when someone asks what she’s doing, she says, “As much damage as possible.” We walk to her backroom. She gives me a cap she says she got from a Greek sailor several years ago when she was in Hawaii. “They were dancing on the tables, and I had a straw hat on with a pair of sunglasses,” she says. “This guy comes over and starts talking to me in Greek, so we had to use a translator. He said, ‘I’ll give you my hat if you give me yours.’ So that’s what we did.” And then she gives me a cowboy hat too, one that belonged to her son before he died the year after her husband did. So I make her put on another hat I find in the closet, and we take a picture together.

The only piece of furniture in the room is a Singer sewing machine. Marina says she’s three inches shorter than she was when she worked at Boeing, that she keeps shrinking, keeps having to hem her pants higher and higher. Later in the lobby of her new apartment she says, “I’m so small that I have to carry a heavy purse so the wind won’t blow me away.”

We go upstairs, get off the elevator, go inside Marina’s new home. Marina digs through her dresser drawer and pulls out a jewelry box with a rubber band holding it together. It’s a box of cufflinks that belonged to her husband, Don. “Take what you want,” she said. “I can’t wear them.” I remember that I only own one button-up shirt and it doesn’t have French cuffs. I look at Marina, almost a hundred. I wonder how many more times we’ll dance together. Thinking I can somehow hold on to her, I reach in the box and pull out a pair of the most beautiful turquoise cufflinks I’ve ever seen. A few minutes later, I stand to leave because it’s after midnight.

Now the sun is up, and I am too, obviously. Thinking about Janie and Marina, I realize that our paths converge and separate, separate and converge. Everything changes as one moment outgrows the next. One day your pants fit, and the next day they don’t. As my friend George says, “You turn around three times and twenty years have passed by.” I guess on some level we know that everything is coming apart, so we do our best to pull it all together. We collect things–cufflinks, newspaper clippings, pictures of when we used to dance with each other or ride in airplanes–hoping to hold on somehow, to slow down the inevitable goodbyes. All of it still passes away, of course, except the love that runs between us. Yes, love is the thread that remains.

[Thanks, Elisabeth, for the pictures of Janie and me.]