By Marah Aburahma

“So you think you can dance”

I stepped on my left foot backward in a charming motion, sliding across the slippery floor. I slid my left foot onward, chasing my retreating other foot with mine, like a fox on the hunt. I stood still, toe to toe, and I pulled my hips in closer. Threatening the audience with my own gaze, I looked to the left, and then to the right. And again, turning my head opposite. To the right, then to the left. Tumbling forward, my bits tautened on my spines as my right foot came frontward again, surprising my foot and chasing it back.

I pushed myself away as though I were too fragile, yet too wonderful. Catching my arms heaved tautly and spinning myself out and away. Then I reeled my back in, unable to give myself up.

I fell,

I fell into myself, thinking of the world where we live, almost filled with frustration, with confusion, with pain, and conflict and division, and once we get so wrapped up in that, we forget how beautiful it still can be. It’s almost like a story  where nothing much happens, More an adaptation of the real world, people die whenever a paper is torn off the calendar, there’s genocide, there’s war all over the globe, Somewhere in the world Doctors, youths, volunteers, nurses sacrifice their lives to save someone else. Every day someone somewhere in the world makes a cognizant choice to destroy someone else, to abolish, to eliminate, and to end. People find friends, love, they betray them, they lose it. Some 6-year-old child commemorates his survival of three wars on his own birthday, a child watches their mother and father beat up to death or their siblings taken away. People are going hungry, some teenager sees his mother dying giving birth to his sibling on a checkpoint. Where people never attempt to change. Where people just struggle but nothing is resolved.

Then again my strong arms were wrapping me tight, protecting me before casting myself out again; As I step up, go round and round flipping my flooded head in a globular wave and continue to slip myself on that slippery floor, I open my fraught, stressed arms to take in all that air with all the power I had running through my veins, and await.

So, you think you figured how the world dances? Typical Round.