IMPROVISE.

THE RELIABLE NARRATOR — PART II

The first time we danced, I didn't know his name yet.

He asked me in the way that felt like an actual question — not a grab, not an assumption — and I said yes. We were good together right away, the kind of easy you can't manufacture. Song after song, we kept finding each other on the floor. I was having fun. My body was doing what it does best: moving without thinking, finding the rhythm before my mind could interfere.

Then at some point later in the night, mid-dance, we hit a patch of fumbles — neither of us landing anything cleanly — and I found it funny. My body does this when something delights me: it stops. I went still and laughed, really laughed, the kind that takes over.

He was still trying to lead me.

And then, over the music: Keep dancing.

Not unkind, maybe. Just loud. Just certain. My body obeyed before I had a chance to decide how I felt about his tone. We kept moving. The song continued. I smiled because that's what you do.

I wouldn't understand until much later what that moment was already telling me.

He was a dancer too. That was part of the appeal.

There's something about meeting someone on a dance floor who speaks the same language — you skip a layer of explanation. You already know something true about each other before you've said much at all. He was skilled. Precise. The kind of lead who had clearly put in the hours, who knew the mechanics of every move.

I liked him. More than I expected to, and faster.

I'm a different kind of dancer. I learned by feel — put me in front of a mirror breaking down choreography step by step and I'll lose it. Put on the music at full tempo and my body figures it out. I improvise. I always have. It isn't a stylistic choice so much as the way I'm wired: instinct first, analysis later, if at all.

For a while, that didn't seem to matter.

Then one night he told me — not unkindly, carefully even — that when I improvised, it made it harder for him to execute his moves. He followed it with a compliment: my movement was elegant, beautiful. He meant it, I think.

But what I heard, underneath the careful words, was: you're harder to lead when you move like yourself.

I understood it technically. I did. There's a logic to it — a follow who moves unpredictably creates a different kind of conversation on the floor. I was even willing to think about it, to consider when to pull back, when to meet him more squarely in his structure.

But I'm not just a dancer. And he wasn't just talking about dancing.

About a month in, we were outside a bakery, waiting in line on a busy afternoon. Close enough to other people that you could hear conversations. The kind of proximity that makes you instinctively lower your voice.

He asked about my political views.

I felt the familiar pause — that moment of reaching for language I wasn't sure I had yet. He noticed and told me I didn't have to answer. But it felt important to try. So I did what I always do when I'm still forming a thought: I started moving before I had the full shape of it. I said I cared about how people are treated. That injustice mattered to me, wherever it came from. That the state of the world felt heavy and wrong in ways I was still learning to articulate.

He didn't wait for me to finish finding my footing.

Baby, that's not a real answer.

Loud enough. Public enough.

I felt heat rise to my face — not just from him, but from everyone around us. Strangers who may or may not have been listening, who may or may not have heard, who may or may not have agreed with him. I couldn't stop myself from wondering: did they think he was right? Did they pity me? Did they think less of him, or less of me?

I wanted to disappear — from his gaze, from theirs, from my own skin.

He softened it afterward, sharing his own views, explaining himself. I listened. Or I tried to. But something in me had already gone quiet, the way my body went still on the dance floor that first night — except this time there was no laughter underneath it.

This was the same move. A different floor.

I had been trying, genuinely. He had encouraged me — to speak up, to share my perspective, to voice what I needed. And I was. Slowly, imperfectly, in the only way I knew how: feeling my way toward the words before I fully had them. But even that small offering wasn't safe. Even trying wasn't enough.

No amount of effort on my part could make his lead feel like an invitation rather than a correction.

He had moments of warmth. But warmth between corrections is not the same as kindness.

The more I look back, the more I find moments I explained away that I shouldn't have. His sense of humor had a jabbing quality — the kind that lands like a joke but leaves a mark. A few days after we met, we were at another social. We danced together again, song after song, our chemistry on the floor as effortless as it had been the first night. We were in sync in a way that still impresses me when I think about it.

But the floor was where the ease ended.

Later that evening we were talking — sharing the languages we each knew. He told me he grew up speaking Arabic, was fluent in English. I told him English was my first language, that I knew some Tagalog, that I'd studied Spanish and Italian and still remembered much of what I learned, even if I couldn't call myself fluent.

He asked me one by one. Are you fluent in Italian? In Spanish? In Tagalog?

No, I said. No. No.

Are you fluent in English?

I hit his arm and scoffed before I'd finished processing how it landed. My body knew before my mind caught up — again. And then the familiar move inward: maybe learning languages isn't that impressive if I can't call myself fluent. Maybe there's something wrong with me.

There wasn't. He had decided to mock the gaps instead of acknowledge what was actually there. I wasn't performing or looking for praise. I was just answering a question I'd been asked. That's not an invitation to find something lacking.

There was another moment. We were relaxing together one day, and he was stroking my hair, looking at my face like he was deciding how to phrase something. He said he liked my eyes — something about their shape. It didn't land the way a genuine compliment should. And then, with a kind of breathy laugh, like someone who already knows the answer but wants absolution anyway: I don't know if that's racist to say or not.

The blood drained from my face. My body tensed. I looked away, hoping that would be enough to remove myself from his gaze.

I know what it feels like to be looked at as an object of fascination because of my ethnicity. To be seen as exotic rather than as a person. I had believed — wanted to believe — that this man saw me. Not my eye shape. Not my background. Me.

I was wrong.

If you have to say out loud that you're not sure something is racist, you already know that it is. The qualifier isn't self-awareness. It's self-protection. He wanted to say the thing and not be accountable for saying it. And I sat there and absorbed it, the way I absorbed everything else, because I didn't yet understand what all of it added up to.

It wasn't only how he spoke to me. There was a way he framed the women in his life generally — as little sisters, as people who needed looking after, as someone to babysit at a social rather than simply a woman finding her footing in a new place. I noticed it. I didn't yet know what to do with what I noticed.

He brought flowers to my family's dinner. He handed them to my aunt. The next morning she and I sat at the breakfast table, the flowers in a vase between us, and she said — confused — I wonder why he handed them to me? I didn't have an answer. I was wondering the same thing.

He had come because of me. The flowers went everywhere but to me.

There was an evening in the car on the way home from dinner, the city passing outside the window, his hand in mine. He told me that my tendency to change plans in the moment, to stay open to where the day wanted to go rather than where we'd decided it should go, was a pain point for him. His exact words.

I felt my gaze fall. I turned toward the window. I loosened my grip on his hand — not enough to pull away, because even then I was thinking about his feelings before my own — and I started moving through every moment I could remember when I'd suggested something different, deviated from the plan, followed my instincts about where we should go next.

I told myself I should have known better. That I needed to be more considerate. More certain. More structured. My first instinct when someone shares their perspective is never to immediately invalidate it — I genuinely try to understand where the other person is coming from, even when it's uncomfortable. So I took it on. All of it. More accountability than was mine to carry.

I was too close to the situation to see what it actually was: incompatibility. Not my failure. Not a flaw to correct. Just two people who moved through the world in fundamentally different ways — and one of them experiencing the other's freedom as a problem.

What I know now: spontaneity is not a flaw. Flexibility is not a character defect. The ability to move through the world without needing it controlled — to stay open, to follow the feeling of a moment rather than the schedule — that's not a pain point. That's freedom.

I cannot be with someone who thinks who I am is a flaw.

It took me a long time to understand that what I was experiencing wasn't mood-dependent or situational. It was structural. It was the architecture of how he saw women — something to manage, to correct, to lead, to protect. Never quite to meet as an equal.

And I was never going to feel fully safe or fully myself inside that architecture. No matter how carefully I chose my words. No matter how many times I tried to make myself more legible, more easygoing, more readable. The problem was never that I wasn't trying hard enough. The problem was that I was trying to fit inside a structure that was never built to hold me.

He was looking for someone to manage. I was looking for someone to call an equal.

Those two things were never going to find each other. Not at all. Not in any way that didn't cost me something essential.

It came from the same place. All of it — the correction on the dance floor, the that's not a real answer, the English joke, the eyes comment — came from the same place. A person who needed to be the most intelligent, most correct, most in control presence in every interaction. Someone who couldn't afford to let a woman be his equal. Someone who kept finding new ways to take the upper hand.

What I understand now is that genuinely confident people don't do this. They don't need to make someone else feel smaller to feel big. The subtle putdowns dressed as humor, the condescension dressed as honesty, the control dressed as leading — that's not strength. That's someone who felt threatened. Not impressed despite himself. Threatened.

And the cruelest part is that it worked. He made me feel like the insufficient one. He needed to dim my light a little just to feel like he was the brightest thing in the room.

The insufficiency was never mine.

For months I carried a low hum of discomfort I couldn't locate. I liked him. I wanted it to work. So I kept trying — opening up a little more, choosing my words more carefully, showing up softer, more legible, easier to read. He encouraged me to speak up, to share my boundaries, to let him in. And I was trying to do exactly that.

But every time I reached toward him, something in me braced for the correction.

That's what I couldn't name. Not that he was wrong for me — I could have accepted that cleanly. But that I had started to edit myself before I even opened my mouth. That I was pre-empting his judgment, smoothing my own edges in advance, becoming a quieter, more careful version of myself just to feel safe enough to be in the room with him.

On the dance floor I had stopped improvising.

Not because he asked me to again. But because I was afraid.

And fear is its own kind of lead — one that gets inside you and moves you before you've decided anything. I stopped trusting my instincts. I second-guessed the impulse to embellish, to play, let my body say something unrehearsed. The freedom that had always come naturally to me began to feel like a risk.

That's the thing about diminishment. It doesn't always arrive as an event. Sometimes it arrives as a habit you don't notice you've formed — the habit of making yourself smaller, quieter, more predictable. Easier to lead.

A month or two ago, I went to a dance social in Iloilo.

I wasn't thinking about any of this. I was just there — in a new city, in a new chapter, on a floor full of strangers. The instructor asked me to dance. He had warm energy, the unhurried kind, the kind that doesn't need anything from you.

We danced bachata.

He led me through complex moves, the kind that require trust, the kind that require a follow who is actually present in her body and not somewhere in her head. And I was present. I don't know exactly when that happened — when I came back to myself on a dance floor — but I was there.

And then I improvised.

Just a small thing. A styling, a flourish, something unrehearsed that my body offered up without asking permission first. I felt the old reflex — the brace, the apology already forming —

He smiled. Welcomed it. Kept dancing.

That was it. No correction. No recalibration. Just two people moving together, both of us fully there, the conversation on the floor going exactly the way it was always supposed to go.

Afterward he told me I danced beautifully.

I didn't shrink from the compliment. I didn't wonder what it was costing me. I just said thank you, and I meant it, and I kept dancing.

This is what I know now: the right lead doesn't need you to be predictable. They don't lose their footing when you move like yourself. They make room for it. They build the dance around who you actually are.

And if someone can do that on a dance floor —

Someone can do it in a life.

The Reliable Narrator is a trilogy. Read On Paper and Dissenting (Coming soon).