This is part of an ongoing series where I process things from therapy. Not necessarily linear, not necessarily sequential, but some kind of order seemed necessary. Although I’ve never seen SATC, these are to be read in the tone of Carrie Bradshaw (but maybe? slightly? less insufferable?)
In therapy yesterday while I was trying to move through a panic attack, my therapist asked me to think of a neutral person, place, or thing. Something I could use to sooth or ground myself in or with. I couldn’t settle on anything except the feeling of my necklace charm digging into the skin of my fingers as I squeezed it hard while on the phone with her. Pain is grounding. After our session I laid in bed and tried to think of something, someone that felt neutral. I couldn’t, so I took a shower and focused on the way the temperature of the water changed on my skin the longer I stood under, scalding then hot then warm, like turning the volume down. When that didn’t work, I huffed a bottle of eucalyptus oil like it was a bottle of poppers. I thought of an empty field then I added wild flowers then I put my best friend in the field. When that didn’t work, I gave up and went to Home Depot. Nothing felt neutral.
I, like most of us, have been thinking about what I will do when there is a vaccine. Who I am going to kiss, where I am going to fuck, who I will travel to first, but I have thought the most about who I am going to dance with. I am desperate to be pressed against someone, hands cupped around a face pulling close and asking “do you want to leave” and hearing “not yet, a few more songs”, then staying until dawn. I can’t wait to meet people for the first time in the dark of a club, new friends from Baltimore, friends I met just before March, who I have yet to dance with. I’m ready for the collective sigh of relief, the processing of grief through movement, experiencing the total spectrum of All Of This through the rise and fall of BPM. Its peak hour in my head and ATB’s “Ecstasy” into Sonique’s “Feels So Good” (OSSX remix) into Ultra Naté’s “Free” (Bok Bok “You're Free 2020 edit)(everyone should be grateful I am not a DJ) and we are together and we are okay and we are happy god dammit! So. Fucking. Happy.
“Disco: (By 5:30am) the music is always good. There’s plenty of room on the dance floor, and only the serious discoers are left. But best of all your body has quit resisting. It has unstoppable momentum. That is the one thing about disco comparable to any other experience. It’s like what happens in distance running or swimming. You pass a point where your beyond tired, beyond pain, beyond even thinking about stopping, thinking only that this could go on forever and you’d love it. Its pure ecstasy. Nothing matters but disco, and nothing-not sex, not food, not sleep, nothing-is better.” -Douglas Crimp
This is an exercise in speculative fiction where the version of the world that I have created in my fantasy is somewhat similar to the one we are in now, but it’s a world with key differences. Mine is a world where a vaccine is readily available, evenly and easily distributed, free to everyone. That fact alone makes it a world that is vastly different than the one we inhabit now. My world is one where once vaccinated, all the people I love will have the means to travel to me, freely and easily, without a passport or identification, on a really fast and very beautiful train that runs on electricity (yes, I dream about trains) and was built by collective labor. My world is one where the people I love WANT to spin around in a dark room while Eris Drew and Octo Octa play the perfect stream of songs, one where trance has a revival because its so corny and sincere and something we all actually liked the whole time (see, fiction!!).
Thinking about this has makes me feel calm, so I have concluded that maybe my neutral place, the place I can conjure in moments of increasing panic and my ideal world, the place I want “when this is all over” are the same: a half full dance floor at 5am, a little bit of fog, and the colors of one of those party lasers cascading against black walls. Moving through a cluster of people, feeling the heat from stranger’s bodies, smelling the mix of sweat and smoke. Finding a spot near the front by a speaker, waiting for the music to wash over me, focusing on the way the volume changes the longer I am there, from cold to warm, like adjusting the temperature of the shower. Then its hands up and people moving, smiling through closed eyes, then it’s “can you feel it?” And it’s “Yes, I can.”
My most expansive landscapes, my most pervasive fantasies, my place of neutrality are one thing: everyone I love is in one place and we are all safe. I think, I hope, our plans for life after a vaccine can go from speculative fiction toward Freedom Dreaming. For me to get what I want here and now, I have to work toward safety being a reality for everyone. It’s trite but a truly safe dance floor means changing the world outside the club. And I want nothing less than that.
(Douglas Crimp also said, “It is our promiscuity that will save us” and I think that is really lovely!)
