Chasing Demons (for Mick)

The little bloke was late to bed tonight. That reality, in conjunction with the steady shortening of the days saw me miss my evening session.

To compensate, I took the maple and urethane longboard out instead, whisping almost silently through empty streets and then along the foreshore, carving and hotdogging imaginary walls and sections and soul-arching up behind unsuspecting slalom-cone pedestrians lost in their headphones or head down engrossed in their precious mobile conversations.

Thinking gets lost, thankfully, in those moments of quiet motion with nothing but the soundtrack of the waves washing though your ears. Anger and the day's events dissipate with each smooth arc described, as childhood memories of similar scenes blend seamlessly with much older muscle-driven digressions.

On the homeward run I stopped for a break in front of the pavilion, and watched entranced as a stocky  young woman attired entirely in white strode purposefully up off the beach onto the concrete and, not far from me, began to move this way and that in a series of deliberate feints, thrusts, lunges and back-pedalling motions, all the while using her right hand as if it held an invisible racquet of some type or another.

For her as for us, it is all about the dance: the rhythmic and repetitious honouring of the body in opposition to  the inevitable advance of its limitations; an undeniable celebration, the giving of bodily thanks for the daily miracle of movement.

© felix ratcliff 2010