Though lovers be lost, love shall be not
and death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

I like to call it a platonic non-romance, this thing that is going on with the ballerina. She’s nice, and sweet and so much like some former lovers, like all lovers. I like to think of it as naïve, unsure. I like to think it’s a game.

It isn’t, of course. It’s not so little, nor so naïve: we’re so aware of what’s involved, of what’s going on, and yet we choose to treat it as a game. She’ll come over and ask what does this or that mean in French, and we’ll go out, see each other, make a special effort not to get to close, not to hug each other or kiss each other or flirt too much.

The ballerina is married, or is about to, I don’t know. M. is his name, and he seems like a nice man. He sounds a lot like me, more so since she sounds a lot like the first, older ballerina. I even feel the moral responsibility of explaining to her what no one explained to the first ballerina, what I couldn’t explain to her: that he’s not tired of her, and that she tires hm but not realising he isn’t.

I’ve threatened (threatened is the word) to hug and kiss her more than once, and she gleefully agrees to treat this as such: threats. Yet today I did. I hugged her and kissed her and held her close for a while. She didn’t resist or fight or back away. She agreed with every move, she moved of her own accord. It was nice.

I spent the afternoon with her, alone at home. I had it for myself, so we watched a movie, listened to some music and danced around in our underwear. Being so close to christmas, it gets dark very late and only at about nine she said she had to go. I knew why I hadn’t gone through with this before: I knew that when the ballerina walked away, when she woke up, she would go and never come back. We weren’t friends, we weren’t lovers: we weren’t. I was a sort of nightmare, one of those strange dreams that seem a little frightening, a little off-center and fun, but you can look at them the way you look at a movie. It was the sort of nightmare she would try to awake from, now.

I knew all this, and yet I asked her to stay for a while, just a bit longer. She was lying in bed with her naked back to me and I leaned and kissed her shoulder. She wouldn’t turn around. She was sad, about to cry. I guessed she was sad because she felt she’d done something terrible to M., to herself, maybe even to me. ”You know”, I said, ”I just don’t get it. I know I feel the same, but I still don’t get it. It’s so nice, to have some one who can hug you, cuddle with you, make you feel safe and warm. Out there, it’s death’s dominion: you go around without an armor, and when you find one place of solace, you have to go out again, forbidden to find another one.”

She turned around and said she wasn’t sad anymore. ”Have you ever been on the worng end of it?”, she asked. ”Has anyone looked for someone else, when they had you?”. I told her of the first ballerina. She had been with someone else once. I would have done the same, had the chance come up. I had even talked about it with her, we had agreed to it. When she told me, I found out I could be happy for her, if I tried. But she didn’t want me to try. She wanted me to ignore it, to toss it away as unimportant. When I tried to talk about it, she rejected me. When I tried to understand it, she said there was nothing to understand: I either felt happy for her or wanted to make her feel unhappy. I did the only thing I knew how to do: I agreed with a smile. Now she was going to get dressed, go out and not come back, and all I could think to do was to agree with a smile. She did turn around and kiss me one more time. ”I would have done anything for her, if she’d only made me feel like she wanted me too. Tell M., for me…” M. was tall, blonde and far away from here. He could have been a thousand kilometers away for all I knew, but I wished he was here, too, that he could simply be happy for her the way I had tried to be for the first ballerina, that he’d succeed in what I had failed. ”Tell him you’re happy. It’s nice to have at least one small place to take shelter, even if it means not having any other. After all, outside, there’s war and rape and murder, just a step away”, and she looked happy.