One of the ways you know you have a real friend next to you is when you aren't sure what you're doing is right or wrong, whether your feelings are justified or not, she still stands by you, offering her shoulders to you. I don't always know what I am doing is right, often have doubts about my decisions, but I know in the end good things will happen to me because when I look around, I see cheering faces.
I will leave that abstraction there, for now. The first real friend I feel I have in New York is this teacher I have known almost as long as I have been doing tango. (When I use unqualified nouns like "teacher" you can assume it's about tango!) I don't get to see her much, except occasionally at a milonga. We have never spent time together. She's always traveling, practicing, teaching. But what makes me feel I have a friend here is that she writes to me, even when I accidentally reveal the not-so-cheery side of me, she writes to me. And at other times, she tells me cheerful things. She encourages me in indirect ways to look at things in a cheerful way, to not let the drama bog me down. When I tell her I am considering giving up tango, she reminds me how much I love the music and the dance.
I am making other friends too, like that woman I had gelato with and talked about all the dramas of tango. I haven't forgotten about making male friends. That's why I had dinner with this guy Thursday night, though I knew him before he moved to New York. I want to be carefully close to this guy who happens to be the teaching partner of the girl I call my first real New York friend. I say "carefully" because he's a complicated man. In many ways, he's not a nice guy; in many ways, he typifies my disgust with men. But he welcomed me before I even started thinking about moving to New York. And most of all, if this friend of mine considers him one of her best friends, there's something beautiful about him that people don't have a chance to see. For whatever reason, he made two efforts to invite me to their milongas as a guest, and that made me feel very welcomed before I even moved to New York.
To embrace tango more I have to, ironically, get away from it more. Do something else. I write a lot about drama in my blog, but that's not because I love drama. I just want to have someone to love and that hasn't happened yet. My sister told me I have to be patient. I think more importantly, I need to focus on myself more than the silliness of finding someone. I talked to this guy I mentioned about. He does Kungfu, which helps with his tango. I am seriously considering doing that. I am seriously considering taking up singing lessons. I know, in both cases it's about tango. There's nothing wrong with centering my life around tango; it's only a problem when dancing tango is the only thing I do. That guy I had dinner with told me how frustrating (and "angering") it is that tango girls can be so flirtatious, making you think they're interested when they are not. Whatever are their intentions, if all I do is dance tango, I am easily sucked into the dramas it creates. This teacher I am calling my first friend told me that if drama makes me feel disillusioned, I have in my power to just get over it and love tango without the drama. She's right. I trust she's right because she's been doing this a lot longer than I have. I know she had experienced worse drama than I can complain about, and every time I see her she's happy. For most people, even those that know me well, I am almost always happy at a milonga. There's no falsehood here. Tango makes me happy. Even if I have to be reminded of the drama because I see this or that person that broke my heart, tango always offers a cheerful arm to embrace me. I talk a lot about drama and complain about it in this blog, but it's important for you to remember that it is a very skewed view of how I am most of the time. Most people write poems when they are sad or heart-broken, and if you only read those poems, you would think the whole world is full of manic-depressives. On Friday I again had to deal with seeing those two together in the same room, but most of me was cheerful, energetic. My two visiting friends from New Haven told me they didn't feel anything was wrong with me because I looked so positive and happy.
It's easy to let the drama take over, not just my blog, but how I feel. It's important for me to take advantage of the majority voice that should overwhelm the complaining tweets of the drama-loving minority.
This weekend is coming to an end. I will go to some art exhibit and then to a photography exhibit. I haven't seen photography art in a while. Photography being one of my other passions in life that gives me just as much joy as tango, minus all the drama. And before I can breathe a little, another guest is coming. Another beautiful woman, just as flirtatious as any I have met. If there's drama flaring up between us this week that she's here, well, whatever happens, I will do my best to focus on the cheerful, optimistic side of me and not let me smile become hostage of the drama-loving minority.
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