Last week, driving to my dad’s, somewhere around the third NPR segment on the heels of virus varients, Cruz Cancuning, and climate/Capitol/car crash catastrophes, Dennis said “Remember when we used to listen to music?” And, yes, I did. The times in college driving down Pacific Coast Highway, window open, hand holding cigarette hanging out the open window, singing along to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” feeling both brave and breathless about what might be around the corner, not of that particular road, but of life. Music was the thing that lifted me up and pitched me around into alternate universes. An escape into whatever I didn’t see out the window. Moving to New York, music became my flying carpet into those worlds I’d wanted to know. Intimately. And I grabbed up to the sun and into the gutter, figuratively and literally too. It’s weird to think back on life being incredibly hopeful and beyond baffling all within seconds of each other. (And being honest, it’s still that way. I can maybe just recognize it faster.) When E.Vedder would leave a message on my phone machine yet I felt incapable of communicating why I was constantly breaking into terror-tears. Be traveling with a band that was rearranging the face of music, while working hard to present my confident face hiding a pretender. Music was still my escape hatch. But then so quickly it wasn’t. The speed of disengagement was so swift and sudden. A little like the Mars Perseverance parachute disengaging. Just poof. Drop. Gone. (I went deeper on that topic in The Stake post over the summer.) At the time, I figured I would find my way back to my rover fairly fast, yet here I am over two decades later still wondering about where my ride went. Apparently I didn’t leave simple bread crumbs. Or the birds ate them. Truthfully, I can still see the trails in the sky when I take the time to look. You can’t know a thing deeply and then completely cut it out of your life without a helluva lot of spadework, which also holds true for understanding why I put it aside in the first place. The very reason music brought me in and held me was the thing that had me twirling out the door. So much damn feeling.

There was a way that the sound and fury, the bombastic and quiet emotions carried on a note did reenter my life. About ten years after I’d stepped out of music’s room, I walked into one where bodies moved in different ways. In a semi-darkened studio across the street from the Chelsea Hotel, I let myself roll around in all kinds of sound. People brought songs I’d never heard before, but could feel in my bones. Then there were the ones I queued up that took me back to when I’d stood side stage watching a band perform them. It dawned on me at some point during classes that letting myself be front and center in the moment, rather than watching side stage as the musicians dictated the terms was kind of incredible. I could also go deeper mainly because the women in the studio were my safety. A kind of what-happens-here-stays-here vibe. Also I found my body just moved to the song, and even if it was one that took me back to a memory I didn’t know what to do with—one that required me owning messy complicity for all the jagged joy and slicing sadness—I’d focus on what my left hip was doing, my chin, or my right pinky and often the judgmental words would crumble to dust and blow away.

A few of us named ourselves The Dance Luvuhs and went off to the Joyce Theater, Bam, the annual Fall for Dance and got lost inside the mostly-modern movement of dance companies. Ballet was beautiful, but we favored the more edgy. The pieces that encouraged unexpected expression: faces, hands, bodies, grimacing, covering, falling. Pina Bausch or, my personal favorite, Karole Armitage, whose moniker The Punk Ballerina checked all my boxes of music and movement. In 2009, we went to see her “Drastic-Classicism” and time froze. For the first five minutes I wanted it to go on forever, but then, when it ended, I was glad it had because it was just enough. Enough to shake me, to make me feel, to remind me what it felt like when music and mayhem (known in this case as choreography) came together and made you watch. Unless you’d gotten up to leave, which I suspect some people did. Thinking back and stretching out the moment, I realize that’s what I’m aiming for now. To stay in my seat and let music float me, toss me out of emotional stasis. Back in the day, when my inner Madge told me I was soaking in it, instead of letting her push my hand back down, to soften up and trust, I jumped up and ran out the door. No emotional manicures for me, thank you. Yet when I see the clip posted above, two dancers responding to a song aching with emotion, something cracks open inside and I know I’m not immune.

The novel I’m writing revolves around a woman, 50 years old, rejoining her old band on the road. Nothing is as it seems or as she remembers. She was a bad-ass. Maybe she still is. But her sense of rediscovery is not going as planned, because of course it isn’t. It’s a novel. Comedy. Tragedy. The stuff of life. Fiction lets you play with those moments, even though I’m pulling from an inner playground of memories, I get to move the see-saw over there and repaint the swing set puce if I want. Running alongside my writing currently is the news that the studio where I let my body be reintroduced to music has closed, the woman at the helm exposed as a toxic manipulator. Honestly, that’s not really a surprise and the exposure a while in coming. The thing that surprises and pleases me though is that none of the beauty I found in those rooms has been spoiled by her bullshit, which I think speaks to the fact that we are capable individually of finding what we need without buying into a cult of personality. In my early studio days, I absolutely placed a stepladder next to a pedestal where she climbed up in my mind. But ultimately, as I looked around, I saw that it was really the women in the room who held me and my heart while letting me roam with no judgment. And they’re still close and lifelong friends. It’s been said time and again that things are never all-good, all-bad. We live in the in-between. Logically I can hear that. Emotionally I often forget. There is absolutely poignancy in knowing I’ll never step into that studio and feel the room’s semi-dark power as the music pulses, my body moves, and my ladies are there taking it in. I’m not so good with change, even though I apparently dabble in it quite often. So when I step into my novel, the story asks me to feel the rawness of music. Not all puddle-reducing or sunshine-blinding, but also the in-between place where pain and pleasure coexist. Turn the radio back on and twiddle with the dial. Sing along. Sob along. Move forward.

Also, for (all) of us negotiating the traumas that this(these) last year(s) has(have) wrought, the very different and personal moments we are all carrying, this piece in Vanity Fair, a chat between Roxane Gay and Monica Lewinsky, is so great. A sample: “So many people with trauma feel like they’re failing because they have a bad day or a bad week or a bad year. And you know what? If you wake up, you’re not failing. If you brush your teeth, you’re not failing. And I think if we just have slightly more realistic goals for ourselves than perfection, we’ll be okay.” Touché and note to self.