Dance Partners

 

The music playing, people bouncing up and down to the beat, a Saranac soda in my hand: the perfect recipe for a good night. But it's missing something. A special ingredient. My dance partner.

My sister and I have been dancing together literally forever. Since she was old enough to walk we would dance. Sure, we took some formal dance lessons like most little girls did. Ballet, tap, jazz. But the kind of dancing I’m talking about doesn’t come from carefully practiced choreography. No, the dancing we do is purely letting the music take us where it will, reading each other’s thoughts, making it look choreographed when it’s not. We could ask the other to dance with a wordless glance, know what the other was going to do before she did it and move accordingly. It's a connection I have with no one else. A connection that goes so far beyond dancing.

I think this is the case with many relationships. Each relationship develops its own connection. Its own special something that makes it different than every other relationship. And every once in a while someone really special comes along and the connection goes even deeper than that. It’s a connection that I very quickly realize cannot be replaced. A connection that is so unique to this one special person that no one can truly fill that void should he or she ever leave.

 I have and have had this connection with a few people over my lifetime. My sister being one of them, someone who, no matter where we are in life, we still have a bond so strong it can never be broken. A friend I met in Roatan being another. Though we’ve gone several years without seeing each other and go weeks and sometimes months without talking, we still have this special connection between us. A love for adventure more than likely the reason. Then there’s a friend from a few years ago. Someone who, whenever something happened in my life, he was the first person I wanted to tell, the only person I wanted to talk to. Someone who, now that he has not been in my life for some time now, I find no one else can truly fill the spot he left behind.

 

So yes, the music is great, the drinks delicious, and the night beautiful, but it needs that one last ingredient. Yes, I will certainly dance with other people other than my sister. I’ve even been blessed with a great group of friends who go out with me now. And yes, some of them even dance with me. I will have that special connection, whether it’s dancing or something else, with many others. Someday I will get married and my husband will dance with me (he better anyway), and we will have a special connection that only we share. But my sister will always be my first dance partner. I will always cherish the times I got to, and get to, dance with her. We will always have a special connection that is ours and ours alone and it will go far beyond dancing. And that, my friends, is something special indeed. That is something to be cherished.