That’s dancing, I guess

Apathy is an ulcer. By the time I noticed what I’d lost, I had already allowed the numbness to leak out and wear away at my body’s lining. I was eating myself–trying to take in enough to understand what it was that people saw in me and fled from. 

Emotional erosion is funny. It’s like staring at the ground where a car crash could have been–maybe was. Might eventually be. Never looking away. 

I was 18 when I began to contemplate death in earnest. There is no logic that could fight the desire to stop existing once it settles in my stomach–no way to kick up enough dust to dislodge it–no amount of effort I could use to chisel it out. 

At 25, I think a lot about a woman named Jamie who I met as a kid. She had curly, graying hair and I can somehow remember every detail of her face. I remember she used to quote Samuel Beckette relentlessly, “I can’t go on, I go on.” 

The full quote is actually, “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” But I’ve always liked the way she said it. “I go on” instead of “I’ll go on.” It’s much better in the present tense–we don’t need to survive the future quite so urgently. 

Jamie told me a story about going dancing, how she felt for the first time in her life what she called, “uncaused joy.” Happy–she just felt happy. Without reason or rationale. She had gray hair when she realized what it was to feel happy. 

I remember going dancing for the first time. Not in a club or at a bar–in a dance hall. I was 20, maybe. I went swing dancing with a friend. I was thinking of Jamie.

Nobody was watching me, and everyone was holding me. That’s dancing, I guess, if done correctly. You’re all just moving together. 

It is a profoundly, almost insultingly simple feeling, uncaused joy. And it is the best of all of us.