BY JOANNA C. VALENTE
“Eye of the Tiger” is playing outside my window as I’m drinking coffee. I start crying and rush to the window, knowing it can only mean one thing: Biden won. The lightness emanates out of my body so fast, so powerfully, it almost feels like my body is swaying in a dance I don’t know but instinctually embrace. I’ve never loved a song I hated so much until that moment.
Soon after, I rush to put clothes on and meet my sister, her husband, and a few of their friends outside to celebrate. We have never wanted to celebrate a politician we never loved so much before, but now is a new time. This time is unlike any before it - while it’s exactly like so many moments before it.
“What a time to be alive,” I text a friend a few months later. I put on Depeche Mode’s “People Are People” and dance.
This phrase is applicable for all of us in so many ways that it’s hard to keep track of all the realities rolled into this one. I keep dancing, hoping to converge all times into one.
*
It’s nighttime in Brooklyn during a particularly hot summer; it’s a summer of protests and masks. The distance has a sound, echoing like a crying ocean, but the ocean is never seen. I am on a boat, endlessly it feels, with no destination. That sound, that crying, never goes away.
“Survivin’” by the Bee Gees wafts outside my window. I pause before I start to laugh, the sound echoing against the cream-colored walls, the high ceiling. It’s a summer of death, and survival, and what better song than this disco beat? We are dancing ourselves away from death, from The Virus, as much as we can.
I sit down, think about all the dead, all the unnamed—the people whose families couldn’t properly say goodbye or mourn them. I am sad for these lonely deaths. A few weeks later, a friend and I do a ritual for the dead outside a bar during the full moon. It was a beautiful, bright, almost ghostly moon. I imagined all of our dead, lost to the chaos of this time, were finding a home for themselves in the moon—embracing and finding serenity and love in a new form.
It’s a story I needed to tell myself. It’s a story I tell myself to survive, even though I know there’s no certainty of an afterlife, of happy endings, of anything. The Virus doesn’t care. Most of our politicians don’t care. Most of us are just trying to survive, no matter what the cost. No matter who we hurt. No matter who we forget.
Later that night, I put on Nirvana and dance as if I knew how to dance. I sang along to Nancy Sinatra as if I know how to sing. I’ve always hated my voice, but sometimes when I’m alone, I pretend not to. Or at least, pretend not to care.
*
Like the earth, we are always in motion—this rhythmic dance keeps us alive and grounded in place, and we often don’t even think about it. This movement is unchanging in that it’s always changing. Now that we have found ourselves thrust still in a perpetual state of not knowing what to anticipate, what to look forward to, we are dancing in a spiral to some unknown destination.
What we don’t always realize, especially in moments of chaos, confusion, and uncertainty, is: This destination is the destination we’ve long sought. The destination, which is to find love and happiness, and the freedom to do so, hasn’t changed. Maybe the journey has. Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe it’s just the wallpaper that has changed.
Life is hardly on pause; it’s always been full of unknowns even if we didn’t want to accept that truth. It’s time we learned to embrace this duality: planning among (more) uncertainty. Learning to dance a new dance and allow our bodies to be vulnerable in new places and angles, to be more fearless.
*
We are full of beats. Our bodies exist because our hearts beat blood to every organ, every limb, every part of ourselves. We live through this beat and we feel it every day. In a time when isolation, a kind of quiet, pervades so much of our daily tasks, no matter how many Zoom calls we have, no matter how wonderful and loving our support system is, our days are quieter.
This doesn’t make them any less full, or wonderous, or lack the fulfillment of a cacophony of rhythms and beats; it does, however, make us dance to a different beat than before. Like all living things, we adapt. We find tools and ways to do this. We shift in motion. For me, one of those tools has been music.
Music saved me during the pandemic. More than ever, it has given me a structure; this structure has helped me meditate, gain perspective, quell anxiety, and connect with loved ones in better and more intentional ways. I’ve been making playlists often, each inspired by a Tarot card, as a way to bookend each week, find a tone and a cadence.
Don’t we love cadence? The word itself sounds so official, it’s become office speak: At work, we say cadence a lot, make calendars in Excel—and generally program our lives around schedules and ideas bigger than our bodies. These songs, I realize, are doing the same thing. They are bigger than I am—and yet, I can live inside them for awhile, like a parasite finding a host body.
Sometimes people reach out to say they really enjoyed a song, or discovered a new musician they love as a result. That makes me happy to know we are supporting each other even in the tiniest ways—knowing across stretches of miles and hours we are enjoying the same beat, even if just for a blip in time.
Isn’t that what the pandemic has taught us, after all? Intentional living? Mindful, more intimate interaction? Prioritizing what actually matters, what you’ve always wanted to prioritize?
We might live in an ambivalent universe where unfair things happen to people without any logical reason, and that many of us are inside the hands of luck more times than we’d like to admit, but these blips in time are not unimportant or inconsequential. They are precisely why we need to value our lives and our time—and fight for them. If Elvis Presley’s rendition of “Blue Moon” on a random Spotify playlist that only a handful of people may listen to can create that blip, I’m here for it.
I lose myself for a moment—in song, in a different beat.
*
The sound on the streets echo up to my fourth floor studio apartment in Brooklyn. The trucks are especially noisy with their monster moans and crashing booms—and there are also the cars that blast music with the windows open. I don’t hear people much. It’s always trucks and cars.
Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” is often on repeat. It must be the same person, I wonder—and I wonder if it’s the same person who sometimes plays “Survivin.’” There’s definitely something in the air this year—in more ways than one. I laugh whenever Collins comes on, wondering who has had sex to that song, if anyone has actually experienced an orgasm during it.
It’s a silly thought—but those thoughts keep anxiety at bay. Humor, like music, connects us in ways that transcend our emotions. Music has called me to turn inward this year, listen to the beat and dance to it—and most significantly, embrace my own beat. For years, before the pandemic, I tried to fit myself into other dances, other beats—whether it was attending all these gritty, sometimes glamorous art events I had already stopped caring about—or just not knowing when to say no, when to stop working, when to ask for what I need, when to put myself first. It took a long time to learn and unlearn, to ask myself the right questions. It’s been a blessing to know the answers for a long time now.
What did I want? What were my real desires? How could I pause and take note, listen to myself and my body, find ways to use my time as a source of love rather than productivity? These are all questions I asked myself years ago during and after my divorce, as a way to reacquaint myself with myself—and to move forward with my life in an honest way.
Are we collectively brave enough to finally ask these questions, look in the mirror, and give an honest reply? Do we recognize the faces we see looking back at us, in this time we live?
Ironically, I’m glad I experienced the utter isolation and loneliness of divorce before the pandemic; in a lot of ways, it helped set me up with coping mechanisms, learning how to sit with myself, ask the right questions, and find ways to reinvent the structure of my life.
Anyone who has experienced a traumatic event, trauma of any kind, knows this—and knows this crackling electrified feeling of new beginnings and rebirth—and how scary those feelings are even when they are pushing us to greater happiness, even when it is chosen. This is what we’re all collectively doing now. It can be exhilarating as much as it can be scary; all change is scary no matter if it’s welcomed or not. We are creatures of habit after all. We love knowing what to anticipate.
Are we finally going to agree to dance to the beat, all our various rhythms, and finally make a single song?
*
When I play records, I wonder who hears them—if my neighbors ever do. If they do, they probably hear a lot of jazz—a lot of Billie and a lot of Dizzy. If only the passersby on the street could hear the crooning of Lena Horne as I put her on while I clean, find the inspiration in her lyrics like I have found in those driving their cars listening real loud to their jams.
I know it is physically impossible for that to happen, but sometimes I wish for the sound to travel in unnatural ways so I could pay all the unintentional kindness forward. So for one moment, we can be linked together anonymously through music as a reminder: We’re still here.
We’re still here together.
Joanna C. Valente is an alien from Saturn’s rings. They have written, illustrated, and edited a few books. Sometimes they take photos and bake ugly desserts.