Dancing with Attraction II

At the next dance, I just watched her from afar. While dancing on my own with familiar partners, I couldn’t avoid looking in her much of the night. Actually, I couldn’t avoid staring. As if my feet were riveted to the floor and my eyes riveted to her movements, I was caught in an embarrassing pattern that began in college. (I was so in awe of the beauty of some coeds that I froze whenever I came near one of them. One in particular, aptly named Athena, was most certainly a goddess that I had the honor to gaze on from the mere mortal world I inhabited. Unconsciously, I knew that I didn’t deserve to be in proximity to their beauty let alone talk to them.)
I drove home in a frozen stupor. Lost in a fantasy of unworthiness, I’d become a stiff dancing mannequin. In my adoration, I’d forgotten that she was actually a mere mortal with a history, a voice, a personality and a wildly attractive set of dance moves. As long as I kept her on a distant, unreachable pedestal, I’d remain a pedestrian figure of hollowness.
Sometime between that night and the next time we shared the dance floor, I took a few cold showers to snap out of my frozen frame. I decided not to be so stiff around this woman no matter how gracefully she moved. I may not be able to dance at her level, but I wasn’t a bad dancer. I resolved to warm myself from frozen to cool, at least.