The drive was smooth, the roads were clear, empty not only of snow but of people, who have opted to stay home lest the storm would get worse. But it didn't. There was a respite. So the drive was perfectly fine. And now, we are here, in the dance hall. There were as expected fewer people than usual. But here we've come not only for the dance but for also the music. The work week finally ended, and here we were, submerged in the music that took us to a different place, far from computer screens, the phone calls, the panicking secretary, the disillusioned coworker, the early leavers, and the overall city that centered around one university that want its own identity but often feel it had to shoulder the burden of the city it had long ago chosen. And we feel sometimes a burden, different kinds depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the season. The storm was just one of many in a series that had hammered this region.
But now, a respite.
Now the music flows through our bodies as well as souls, dissolving us entirely into its fluidity.
The stress associated with social dancing also took us to another place that at once familiar but also remote. I stood up and looked around, especially towards the section where the best dancers, or at least those who made themselves look the best, congregate. I tried looking nonchalant, avoiding any scent of despair. That particular skill of nonchalance had to be honed over the years. I remember in the beginning the frustration, the despair, the defeatism. And sadly those memories didn't seem so distant. The wounds of rejection were fresh and the seeds of fear were abound. Nevertheless, those beginning years. When self-confidence was put out there in the flesh, when vulnerability was lying in the open for the vultures to tease and attack. Now in this dim dance hall, part of a restaurant, I saw that neophyte from a few year's ago, and I could still taste the dry mouth, the hopeless schemes to get dances, the nervousness of maintaining the catch, and the many internecine months of avoiding the dance to recuperate in the hospice of my own soul a battered pride and a wounded ego.
But as I stood there, surveying the availability and calculating the likelihood of rejection, I melted, involuntarily, or more precisely, by an external force. Not a force. What was it?
It was the music. The music that, unlike the actual dance, always made me happy, always welcomed me, never put on a wall of rejection. And in this respite between the the storm that had been unleashed yesterday and the storm that would follow us up the road back home later, I was suffused in the music that could be romantic and tragic, playful and joyous, or simply a poetry of a country and its people I've only met in my imagination forged by the music. How can there be wounds and egos and anger when you are the music? The music itself isn't a tragedy, isn't at all what it is singing; the music itself is the love. And so I sat back down, my nervous heart resumed its normal rhythm that is in sync with the beat of this music of a far away city that has no blizzards or the respites between blizzards. And whatever happened the rest of the evening, I was already enjoying this break between the past and a future I have yet to meet.
