Afterlives

I am hungry to throw myself into the shoe-scratched darkness of a dance floor. Call it the thrill of a greenhorn: as the air thickens with salt and bodies, I wait, as a follow-dancer often does, in a dance before the dance. A lead dancer walks in my vicinity, I flick my eyes up. If their irises catch in the light and they extend a hand, they desire to share this moment with me.

* * *

I started to learn Latin social dancing after a brief spell on a ballroom dance team. There, my ankles wobbled during the lengthy, punitive steps of the waltz and the tango – but after going to a Latin dance club for the first time, I discovered bachata, its flowy movements rooted in one locale beneath my feet. And so, the summer before my senior year of college, I decided to further entertain my curiosities in the dance form.

I was in Seattle for a nine-to-five summer internship at a tech company, where my day-to-day had two core responsibilities: one, encouraging seasoned engineers that my blueprints for a digital platform were to be trusted; and two, lobbing back defenses of my hypothesized solutions, heart pumping with cold brew. As excitable interns flocked to dinner spots and dorm hangouts every night, I would make my commute home: jaw tense, eyes glazed. I’d swallow a rudimentary dinner in my studio apartment, stuff my smelly dance heels in a bag, and make my way across the sleepy city.

I discovered various haunts for Latin dance fiends in the Puget Sound area, and my first night dancing was in early June, at Salsa con Todo: its door frame pulsing with music on a street spotted with bars. The bachata room was already lively: the mirror-covered back wall throbbing with the steady pulse of the stereo, couples undulating below the disco lights.

Nervous, I strapped on my tan dance heels. My shoes signaled expertise I did not have – I had only attended two lessons prior – and so, with each song the DJ queued, a lead asked me to dance. Each instance thrilled and disquieted me: forcing me to divulge my internal rhythm through our pressed fingers. I’d apologize for my beginner level, and it distressed me further when I’d pull us off-beat – Are they tossing my hand somewhere? Oh, I’m behind them now! But we’d exchange smiles, and that’s all we needed. Soon, my hips began to settle into the basic sways of the bachata.

An hour later, I was standing to the side in brief repose when a man in a polka-dot shirt extended a hand to me. “Would you like to dance?”

I’d met people who echoed my dance language before. The first time was with a beginner ballroom classmate: our frames slotting together smoothly with each turn, our acceleration into the next figure synchronized, our bodies’ muscular tension meeting in natural equilibrium. Still, I often felt exposed by my jolting missteps on the competition floor. Here, I was cloaked in a darkness brimming with body heat, strobe lights casting us in ethereal green as we met each note at the exact moment of its sounding. I had no name, no duty to remedy myself – and it was glorious.

As the song entered the chorus, our grammars clicked together. Everything was where it needed to be: my limbs warm, a perfect density of close but not-too-close dancers on the floor. I didn’t think, just intuited the way he guided my shoulder. It was magic of a balance struck, like a radio frequency: a partner dialing into how you shift your weight, grooving between beats the same way you do.  I remember the culmination: catching our grins in the mirror before I was whisked into a triple turn. The song faded, both of us caught in the coda of a shared breath.

I danced, hoping for an escape. On those nights, I could extricate myself from demands for my presence, my need to elaborate on it. I needed this release – from work, yes, but also from explaining to my sister why I didn’t tell her I went to the emergency room when she lives in Seattle – didn’t I trust her? Or from text check-ins with a college friend, who cried over me prioritizing others over them – was she not a best friend too? It was taxing to feel as though, whatever I did, I would be evaluated for my performance – professionally and personally.

But on the dance floor, there was no defense I had to construct – in fact, a genuine dance depended on not having one at all. I’d gaze at a stranger, in an unspoken promise to accept each other precisely in that juncture of space and time. We’d be forced to craft a lingua franca, because keeping each other afloat superseded our own selfish desires: from them hoping to do complex moves I did not know, to me wishing for a clearer lead. Even with the few regulars I began to recognize, there was a memoryless intimacy to each encounter, a rocky dance soon forgotten in the streams of guitar music carrying us through the night. A few weeks in, I stopped warning each dance partner of my beginner level, slipping into the folds of this liberating estrangement.

***

In late June, I was taken to the University of Washington Medical Center emergency room with intense chest and abdominal pains. My consciousness floated outside myself, unable to form words out of sensation, as my boyfriend, who was visiting for the week, asked me if the Tums felt effective or if we needed to escalate. The ER doctor politely defused my panic of a premature heart attack. A follow-up urgent care visit explained that the weeks of ibuprofen from my wisdom teeth surgery, as well as my increasing caffeine intake, had scrubbed my stomach raw, its acid clawing towards my esophagus.

My older sister took a day off to accompany me to my visit: her purposeful walk slowed to meet my pace. Her explanation of my medical insurance slid into upsetness over my reluctance to seek counsel from her: choosing classes, relationship developments, going to the ER. I had suspected that she’d grow upset over me seeming to trust my boyfriend more than her, or that she’d start worry-ranting – as was family custom – about how I should have told her, the Seattle resident who knew the lay of the land; how I could have asked for more thorough tests or medical advice; or how we otherwise could have handled the situation better. I just wanted to move on. Her reaction to the truth of my hospitalization – which came out since I asked my mom about urgent care – only confirmed my predictions. And so, I decided to conclude that she viewed me as obstinately independent, or crazy in love, or otherwise lacking some essential quality of a younger sister.

Sometime in July, she invited me to a social dancing event at Alki Beach with her friends, who all had done a bit of salsa dancing before. “You can carpool with them, but I’ll meet you there,” she told me over brunch.

On the car ride, a friend mentioned that bachata looked so sensual – chests pressed, knees between thighs – and everyone agreed it would be odd to get that close to a stranger.

Once we arrived at the beach, they pulled out a picnic blanket and some bottles of soju from the trunk of the car. We settled down on a hilly patch of grass, a stone’s throw away from where dancers had already begun to cluster: a concrete promenade gazing over the Puget Sound, overlaid with a makeshift dance floor. My temporary companions chatted about their love lives, unrushed to join the crowd as we awaited my sister. I sat in the corner to offer occasional interjections, masking my self-conscious dissociation with my go-to veneer of solitary self-assurance.

Over the past few months, I’d been eagerly delving into bachata’s sensual cadence – picking up body rolls after a dance or two, whipping my hair back in dips – but it sounded like the desire, my desire to dance with strangers appeared illicit, even pitiful to them. A cruel anxiety twisted in me, and I shot off a where are you? i can’t dance since you’re not here yet message to my sister. She arrived five minutes later, apologetic. I felt vindicated, and entirely guilty.

In clinging to bachata, I was clinging to the notion of appearing unconditionally alive: a life form rife with possibility. There was no pressure to sustain any responsibility to satisfy, or impress, or some other social function, when all I had to do was take a stranger’s hand and sink into the rhythm – or, that’s what I told myself. I believed that without a primed idea of me, they could grasp amorphous parts of myself more than others could – my bashful exuberance, my newfound sensuality –  even if just for a three-minute song.

You were so good, my sister said later, her friends nodding emphatically, but I didn’t believe her. My perception was slanted the entire evening: my turns off-center, my ankles wobbly. Maybe it was the bumpy concrete, or the mud that clung to my heels and wouldn’t let go, or the dusk that coated everyone in soft tangerine, faces blurry against the blinding light.

***

My most recurring dreams are encounters with those to whom I have made myself a ghost.

My lack of responses to them started harmlessly enough: with a prom date who was acting weird, an elementary school friend. Then, an online friend who had comforted me through my family trauma, a high school friend who had helped me peel my feelings open for the first time. From there, I couldn’t stop my untethering: classmates I hoped to befriend, my sister and my mother when I was at school, and even close friends from college, most of whom had already graduated that spring.

In the dreams, I often saw those from whom I severed myself in rapid succession: awkward chance encounters in which I had to explain my disappearance; or glances of their silhouettes from afar, their silent presences rebuke enough. I’d try writing to them too: imagining heartfelt renewals of our relations, composing apologies, even believing I’d sent them, only to find them as drafts in my notes or simply nonexistent. And I couldn’t bring myself to deliver them, not with the threat of reproach and loss: You want to schedule a monthly call and not biweekly? You respond to your friends in seconds but not your mother? Hi, just wanted to check in one last time. I did not withdraw from everyone’s lives, but it was a high enough number to hover over me constantly, a rubber band to snap against my wrist whenever I wanted a sting.

On some days, between my bachata classes, pill ingestions, bus commutes across the Puget Sound, intern hangouts for which I mustered the little social charm I had, and TV binge-watching to unravel the adamance I adopted for work, I’d try to call a friend.

It’s hard to talk beyond just our updates, I’d prefer a regular time where we also can do an activity. Would every two weeks or every month work? A call with another friend, a worry they’d extrapolate a friend-stack-ranking because they’d learn of the communication cadences I had with others. A call with another, a worry they’d ask for less because they know I’m also asked for more.

I felt consumed by demand, demand I felt guilty for not coveting. Upon waking, I’d let new messages sink noiselessly into my inbox, even losing track of a few post-graduation job leads in the process. Severing myself from expectations felt like the safest choice. To sink into artificial familiarity instead, hands stretched only when it seemed someone was bound to take it in theirs.

***

One night in July, I took the 1-Line towards Angle Lake to Century Ballroom, its wood-paneled dance floor bordered by velvety curtains. There, a man asked me to dance: a tilt of the head, a palm facing up. His face, a blur of indigo memory under the dusk-lit ballroom.  In a slower cascade of the song, he asked where I was from. “I’ve never seen you here before,” he said.

I explained I was here for the summer and that I was from New Jersey. He asked me to guess his origin. “A Spanish-speaking country,” he hinted, “It starts with a G.” An eight-count later, I landed on Guatemala. He nodded in approval, and we resumed dancing. He was close to my five feet of height, and there was a comfort in his smaller yet sturdy stature, which sheltered me through our circlings of a joint axis. Toward the end of the song, he confessed.

“You remind me of someone back home.”

Something cracked in me, eggshell-like. There was a finality to back home, a sheepish tinge of justification, maybe for why our dancing had settled into itself without much resistance. My skin prickled in caution at its potential romantic implication – but I sensed no change in his lead, which was neither domineering nor prescriptive in expectation of me. Just an open presence steadied by nostalgia, inviting my symmetry: a toss of the wrist, a tilt of the chest. Patterns haunting a body once familiar to someone.

I wasn’t sure if he hoped for a response. “What’s her name?” I asked, and his lips moved, with a funny little smile. But above the stereo’s croons of lost love, I didn’t catch what he said. When the song ended, I asked him again for his name, but that slipped away too, after a few other dances.

I had re-crystallized her: a ghost of a ghost, of someone being missed. To surmise as if I had known this stranger, I’d say we reached for proximate intimacies for differing reasons, mine the more selfish one: for him, to revive someone he lost; me, to be the one not found.

***

I hadn’t expected my boyfriend to be concerned about me dancing with others, as a ballroom dancer himself. And he wasn’t – but during one of our calls, he tentatively expressed a worry that I’d begin to enjoy dancing with others more than him since he did not know bachata as well. There was an uneasiness in his voice, likely exacerbated by our temporary separation.

I steeled, readied for battle to defend the Independent Woman. I shot back, do you expect me not to dance then?, and grew resentful of the separation anxiety that still simmered beneath his insistent encouragement of my dancing. Soon, I opted for stealth, avoiding discussing my Seattle dance escapades during our virtual catch-ups.

One of our go-to online activities was a game, It Takes Two – a partnered game in which advancement relied on the coordination of both players’ timings and actions, a routine of its own. My job was to smash two buttons, running an L-shaped curve between them within a few seconds. But no matter how furiously I toggled my controller, I failed for the next twenty-four minutes as he completed his task; we achieved the same result when we swapped roles. Thereafter, I made a spiraled descent into self-deprecation: about how I was not an easygoing companion unbothered by winning or losing, about how he should seek other puzzle-minded people to play his games with.

I just want you to have fun, he promised, I don’t care about anything else. I tried to express the same sentiment back to him. We might need some rules, routines; but setting our rhythms loose, letting them mingle is what makes a dance singularly ours to cherish. But his worry about measuring up to my bachata experiences inverted into my own unease: what if I cannot fulfill some expectancy to keep up with his unique tempo; and he for mine?

We danced — once in Seattle, and in Boston before and after my time there. We’d swing, loop, duck and jive; extend our arms to each other, eager to co-invent. Our twin orbits buffered a margin of precious quiet around us on the bustling dance floor. Others gazed, curious at how his coiling of the hips catalyzed my spinning undulations. We threaded through the bachata beat, but on our own time signature — and loosen, I’d say to myself, remember the hips, dear. Still, I’d occasionally slip from his grasp or twist my wrist, feel the anvil of self-judgment, and dually wonder and fear if I should slide into the crowd, releasing my anxiety about construing that delicate sort of chemistry which endures.

***

My last week in Seattle was clouded with obligations: packing up my apartment, presenting a slidedeck on my accomplishments in hopes of re-employment at my company, and preparing my goals for my last year of college.

So, I went dancing for a few nights straight. I had already prepared for my departure, an odd hollowing in my stomach that had grown more painful as I exchanged social media handles with a few regulars, mentioning that I would be leaving soon. On my last Thursday at Century Ballroom, I approached those I’d danced with prior, asking a stranger to film my last dances with them. There, I also encountered a man from Norway, whom I encountered at another studio a few days prior.

We danced together twice, a routine occurrence for a long night. But when I sat down to rest, he asked to converse about dance, work, and miscellaneous life topics. Other dancers, who’d often invite me off the tables to dance, saw his figure occupying mine and stayed away. Resentment began to fester: I didn’t promise anything to him. Yet there I was, tied to him, inhibited.

“Seems like no one is approaching because I’m here.” He chuckled awkwardly. I hardened after that: giving one-word answers to his remarks until he acknowledged my withdrawal and walked away.

At the end of the night, I sat down to peel my shoes off my callused feet. He approached, his gentle-giant frame downcast in front of me. “Thank you for the dances,” was all he said, softly. “I really enjoyed it.” I echoed his sentiment with a feeble me too, a dissonance thrumming in my chest as I watched him exit into the blue of the night.

I don’t think it was wrong for me to be wary of unwanted male attention – but his lone silhouette felt kin to my own, another chaser of unadulterated acceptance. I wished to remain memoryless, but any momentum I enacted or withheld from someone engendered encounters, collisions. Something new that neither of us could keep alive on our own.

A few weeks before I left, my sister apologized, reflecting that her gruff demeanor didn’t always create a safe space for me to share things with her. I crumpled a little, stammered about wanting to reciprocate, an ethos I fiercely, theoretically protected. In high school, I read a book about sisterhoods, Deborah Tannen’s Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives. It revealed that conversations between sisters were often one-sided, the older supporting the younger much more. At the time, my sixteen-year-old self had resolved to counter that imbalance, to reserve what I could as a solitary burden. Perhaps I looked past how we could fill in for each other. Or even, how we desired to.

The day before I flew back home, she helped me pack up my studio. We jointly bemoaned the lack of news on my return offer, wolfed down dinner at a vibey Mediterranean restaurant, and lugged my two huge suitcases to her place to stay the night, since she was closer to the airport. She grabbed both, leaving me with my pastel-checkered carry-on and a pair of colorful stools I’d borrowed from her, in case I had company. My dance heels were in my backpack for easy access – carefully placed, since I knew Century Ballroom was just a block or two away. Just one more dance, I considered, tempted.

That night, I tucked my toes into borrowed slippers and sunk into my sister’s blue couch, my hips pressed next to hers – everything warm, and breathing, and still.

* * *

On my flight home, I revisited the dance videos I took. Floral shirt man’s funky footwork; and his cheers during my tentative moments. Marathon dude’s explosive energy that spun me like a roller-coaster; and his tempering of force to balance our weights. Bicycle man, whose disjointed, determined limbs I invited back into tempo. And myself, who ostensibly had smooth, airy turns; and perhaps other tendencies only others can know. Our faces emerging from the indigo darkness: flushed, excited, alive.

I listen as the song ends, and pairs on the dance floor enter a last spin under an arm raised like a makeshift roof, a last back-arch supported with a forearm. Thank-you’s, high-fives, shy embraces. And it begins again: the DJ queues another bachata song, a new heartrending succession of guitar strums, the same nostalgic pulse running through. I remind myself of the pattern at the core of every step: one, two, three, tap; one, two, three, tap. Flowing left and right to regain any loss of momentum, looking with pure recognition into the eyes of someone I know or will soon know. If all else fails, I think, return to this.