Confessions

Deirdre Towers
4 min readJan 4

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Trials of a soon-to-be-hyper-focused

Quito, Ecuador. Photo by Author.

Oops…45 minutes late. Would they bounce her from the 5am club?

Too late to worry, too early to know.

She stared at the Hudson River, mimicking the rock of a tugboat and the wink of the sun, the light leaping from glass tower to river. The grey waters glistened as though the river was beaming in its sunbath. She wondered whether her spine could ever sway as calmly as the reflection of the glass tower. For anyone just a tad bi-polar, swaying your spine from side to side with the ease of a snake can be centering.

She closed her eyes slowly, consciously turning off the electricity, the excitement of her senses. Like flipping a light switch, she was stunned momentarily by the dark, realizing that deliberate shut-eye gestures are ironically a wake-up call.

Am I dancing in the moment? she wondered; bouncing between the known and the unknown, the past and the soon-to-be-past known as the present.

Is this some kind of heaven? She had paused the noise in her head. Imagine being able to hear the mechanics of compressing thoughts into words. Maybe AI robots will teach us how to hear/watch/observe the working factory of our minds. Perhaps we will hum along.

“Being without self-censure” sounds like an ad for a drug. Recapture the innocence of a newborn; ride each breath with the brazen delight of a girl screaming on a roller coaster on her first date.

In with the good air, out with the bad, she attempted to unfurl, unwind, undo whatever needs to be undone.

If only she could exhale all her cobwebs, her detritus, and her vile stupidity!

Just watch that thought pass by.

Inhale 3, exhale 3….

The hairs in a nose work non-stop, filtering all that air. How often are the hairs replaced, she wondered. Is mucus a sign of over-production? How many hairs are there? Should we be able to hear the wind in the nose, like a breeze on pine needles?

Just let it go. No need to google nasal filtration systems right now…

She danced with her breath, aware suddenly of the thump of her heart. Her back tensed at the crest of the breath, almost resisting the exhale. Her chest pressed down forcing the air out. The heart is so much easier to follow than the breath. Why don’t we get the advice to listen to the beat of the heart — because the breath demands a longer attention span?

Oie….Can we please get on with the business of not thinking and dodge the circular, argumentative nature of every question? It’s a bit invasive you know.

Ok. You. No more of that! Now…just flush out anything remotely unbecoming.

Chill….

She sank slightly into the chair. Her eyes flickered. She gazed at the back wall of her mind. For a flash, her conscious and unconscious snuggled together, enjoying cerebral adventures of a hallucinatory kind. Duality, be gone! Bring those two sides of yourself, the leftie and rightie, the angel and her nasty, bad-ass, evil twin. Let’s get single-minded for once, for the thrill of it.

With that, she gave birth to an exhale coming from so deep within, her tailbone swung. Her vertebra sang! Her chakras spun.

Nina Simone sings for me! “It’s a new day, a new dawn….birds know how I feel.”

She felt her cheeks flush; her essence shining like a filament. She felt irrepressible!

Oh, shut up! Quit the self-congratulatory And the self-deprecating commentary.

Dive off the cliff of the known, surrender control, and fly.

Just join the journey of the breath.

Exhale all that, all of that…calm down. Slip down, quietly, gently.

Inhale.

“Robert Greene’s Daily Law: ‘Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. Obsessional thoughts and past experiences are like boulders or mud in this river.’”

Dissolve those boulders and free the stream of being.

Could one really wipe one’s spirit clean, as easily as a child brushing plaque off their teeth?

Now, where was I? Pshhh.

The rise and fall with every breath is hypnotic, isn’t it? Like being at the beach, watching the waves kiss the beach.

The muscles in my lower back just relaxed...

Hmmm.

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Deirdre Towers

Writer for The Dance Enthusiast. Produced LA CHANA, the award-winning flamenco documentary, the Dance on Camera Festival (1994–2012).