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All the way west, where Isadora Duncan was born and saw her family ruined in finance, to which her response was drop out of class, teach dance: I’m reading the latest conference abstracts, which assure us that the right distance answers any statistical question. Mine is distrust in the premise, life as an aggregate task, where the threshold of significance, technically, lapses to insignificant anything that risked going missing. Isn’t that what the coast means, after all: past the chance for time and space? All? Everything counts because everything lasts. Duncan’s children were drowned. Her school was unheated. Her last words—to love!—were shameful and thus misquoted. Out here, they build on the faults because they know nowhere else. The man who promised me forever, then left, would shudder in his sleep as if dreaming a past of quakes or a future: I held on. It doesn’t matter that no one predicts their own happiness and everyone is in pain, that the best use of a mind is to unmake its own inaccurate faith that what comes next will be utterly different and utterly the same. Or the best use of the body, not the mind. Duncan, running: she “left herself behind.”
