Flamenco

Picture from here
She moved like her life depended on it and maybe it did because she knew that if she were to stop, following the rhythms of the guitar, she might die. She turned this way and that, bending her skirt with a furor that was only matched by the staccato of her feet.

A tear rolled down one cheek and then another and then another and then another. She wept, swept away by her private grief. I watched her, wrapped up in mine.

She wept for her lover, departed, returned to the cloying hands of the earth. His farewell unattended as it was not a place where she was welcome even though at his side, she had been for almost a decade.

She turned this way and that, her fingers curved, wrists flicking back and forth with fierce precision, her face a wet mask of agony. Bathed in the soft, poor light of the stage, her form silhouetted against a wall whose paint had been worn away by years of smoke, sweaty bodies and forgotten dreams.

I loved her, this beautiful dark dancer. She would never be mine. I was only the girl who would hold her while she mourned for the one to whom she had given herself