These fragile bodies of touch and taste
This vibrant skin, this hair like lace
Spirits open to the thrust of grace
Never a breath you can afford to waste
Don't look down.
I didn't, I just know it's there.
It's the sky and you're a bird, he thinks, and I hear him plain as day over the roar of the crowd.
I'm a chicken. So you're right, I think and he laughs inside his head.
When I hear the drumbeat I count them, one two three and you would have thought I would have left the platform but we are performers and suspense is part of the game. Four five SIX and I'm away, soaring through the darkness toward Lochlan on the opposite quarterpole. The chaulk grinds into my palms, the trapeze is cool and familiar. The moment I am airborne I leave the fear back on the platform. The roar surges like a wave, crashing over my head, forcing my ears into a brown-noise silence as I focus in on Lochlan. Back away from him now I swing my whole body up so my knees loop up around the bar. I let go and the noise grows more intense, like a sudden forest springing up around me and I am cutting through the notes of its leaves in the sky. Away again and then he is off. I watch him, head up, torso curled in a J, waiting for the perfect sync. On the third meet up he smiles and holds his hands out from halfway and I grab them and let go of the trapeze, letting my body swing free. The only thing between me and the ground now is the bubble of adrenaline and his hands, now in a powdery death grip.
He asks if I am okay to go and we launch into our dramatic rendition of two aerialists when everything has gone wrong. It was called Lovers in a Dangerous Time*, like the song (I didn't like that song, if you're wondering. I have now heard it at least four hundred thousand times.) and the entire act was disguised as a regular acrobatic routine right up until it isn't, and there is a fun moment when he lets go of my right hand and I begin to flail. The crowd noise is unbelievable now, holding me up, threatening to burst the seams of the big top and he fights for me. He reaches down and pulls me in with his elbows, putting his free hand on my face. A kiss and the subsequent deafening roar makes us laugh.
I love you, he says but I can't hear him before I drop back precariously. Then he fights again and I take his lead and crawl right up his body, over his back and sit on the swing. The crowd cheers and I drop back again to the screams below. This time I drop upside down, however, and he pulls me back up until we are both on the trapeze again, knees firmly hooked, but facing each other, locked in a long embrace. Just as the lights dim we kiss and let go, falling together and I'm one hundred percent sure anyone who ever saw that act was scarred for life. We disentangle and he shoves me away in the final fifteen feet and we land in the net (you can't land together, you might get hurt) and he bounces out easily before I crawl off the net into his arms at the edge.
It was fun. It was beautiful. We played it to a packed house every night once a night five days a week only because it is tiring and then we bailed the minute more money came along, an offer from a competing show. A global one, and one with so much liability insurance they wouldn't allow for creative control on the part of the artist and falling deliberately into the net was grounds for dismissal so we were forced to come up with something new. We did, lasting less than three weeks performing, doing a midnight run with our withheld money and as much of their gear as we could carry, and Lochlan's newest plan was that we would mount our own show. Maybe our own tour.
Just as soon as we could find a tent to borrow, rent. Or steal.
It didn't happen. We went on the sideshow instead. I wasn't sorry. The whole thing took place on a stage. Relief was soon replaced by a dread of a different kind but I was just so happy to be in such a weird place in a weird (and dangerous) time that I hardly took a moment to acknowledge it then the way I do now. The strength we built up over that summer to do that routine was more than physical and apparently it was time-limited.
Bawk bawk, Lochlan whispers in his sleep and I burst into giggles involuntarily.
*(Someone ALREADY emailed to tell me that song came out in 2001 so what's up, as I already had two children by then and clearly wasn't in the circus anymore. That's a cover by Barenaked Ladies. The original, the gloriously haunting OG version by Bruce Cockburn came out when I was thirteen years old. Listen to that one at least, if you want to hear the song. And if you want to hear a song that's less serious by him, listen to Wondering Where The Lions Are, which Lochlan sings with a hilarious exaggerated enthusiasm that has never failed to cheer me up. We never did find out where the lions were, and it's been...ahem...forty years.)