Recommending Butoh

We met 61 years ago.

Tall, handsome, elegant, eloquent, a university professor and, unreachable. You were a success object of the 1st magnitude, not to be captured by a silly girl like me who, at 20, understood very little. Nonetheless, we were friends of sorts for almost 35 years.

Of African descent, pale as the underbelly of an albino guinea pig, you were a tortured man. To make your life more difficult, in your time, homosexuality was punishable by law. When it ceased to be illegal, you were still imprisoned. It was too late for you. You couldn't untie culture's knots.

The studied movements of your hands and body seduced me but, to no effect.

Butoh would have suited you. Some players white-wash their bodies to efface the ego and then perform in an ether of blackness. How they move their bodies is how you moved yours and, like them now, you were alone in the universe, a pale molecule floating in the darkness.

Happiness wasn't in the hand you were dealt. Concealment from head to toe under a layer of white theatrical paint might have helped.