We were dancers, once.

That was who we were.

Two people who knew how to move together, who could feel the next step in each other’s hands before it came, who trusted the other to be there when they turned.

I did not know, dancing at my own wedding in 1985, that we would slowly stop — that life would take the music away one obligation at a time — and that I would wake up nearly forty years later across a breakfast table from a man I no longer knew how to move beside.

I have wondered, in the years since we found our way back, why it was dancing, of all the things we could have lost, that we lost first and mourned most.