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Writing inspired by the following SWC prompt: 

Do you dance?

Dance-Break

by Eleanor Updegraff

I was woken this morning by the flash of a blue light, an ambulance speeding fretfully towards dawn. In the bold white glare of last night’s moon, still high and pouring light through my window, I was uncertain for a moment where the flashing was coming from, if it was real or just some trick of my vision. Only when I heard the distant wail of the siren, switched on as soon as the vehicle left the village, did I know for sure what I’d been seeing.

I’ve been doing this a lot recently: waking disorientated in strange beds. Most, actually, aren’t strange to me at all, but they feel it because of the frequency with which they change. There’s the queen-size in my best friend’s back bedroom – now kindly referred to simply as my room – and the new double in my parents’ house to replace the single I’d had since I was a child. Another friend’s sofa features occasionally, moss-green velvet with a view of the Thames, and the lumpy futon in my brother’s spare room, surrounded by his guitars and my nephew’s toys. Over months I’ve grown used to snatching sleep in all of them, yet still I wake often not knowing where I am, confused by the angle of light streaming in, trying to turn to the window and encountering a wall.

Change has become a constant of my life now. It always has been, of course, to some degree, yet these days absolutely nothing seems static. I wake with my heart pounding, sleep through uneasy dreams, am never without the list of things to do cycling round and round my head. I hold on to this task list as a way to keep me going, like I cling to other small anchors in the course of every day. Grinding beans for a morning cup of coffee. Sleeping with the window open. Tuning in to the early shipping forecast. Reading before bed. I listen to the same songs on repeat; I cook, when I get chance, the same meals over and over. Often, I combine the two, dancing my way around the kitchen. I sing loudly and out of tune – but only when no one is listening.

There’s a note on my phone that has been there for a long time, but, like so many of the things I write down, has only recently seemed relevant. It’s a line by Caleb Azumah Nelson, from his debut novel Open Water, a slow and deliberately gorgeous book about friendship and love and what we gain by losing both. In one scene of almost startling intimacy, the main protagonist dances alone in a flat in South London, and when he has finished describing this feeling, he asks the reader, ‘Or do you dance even when you don’t know the song?’

The first time I read those words I typed them as a reminder, and they’ve been echoing in my head ever since. There’s something about that sentence, its easy rhythm, the opening ‘or’ that admits other options but equally gives us no choice. If they spoke to me then, those words, they speak to me even more now. Because it has only been in recent months that I’ve learned what they actually, truly mean.

Over the course of my life I’ve been taught ballet in a church hall, tango in a smoky Argentinian milonga, ‘YMCA’ and the ‘Macarena’ by a line of patient friends. I wouldn’t say I was ever particularly good at any of them – not like my sister, who’s joined a Latin dance troupe, or the couple I used to work with who won ballroom competitions most weekends. But people dance in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons. Some badly, like me; some with skill; some for the pure joy of being. Some people cannot move their bodies and dance only in their minds. Others believe they cannot do it and sit more happily on the sidelines. Though they can, of course; we all can do it. Humans were born to keep moving.

My friend J, who is proficient in salsa, taught me about the importance of a dance-break. Most days, especially when life feels overwhelming, she puts on a favourite song, turns up the volume, and dances around her living room or kitchen. It is, she says, one of the very best releases. To dance for yourself when no one is watching.

J lived for a time in Brazil, where, she tells me, dancing was a regular evening activity. At the end of the day, you’d go out for a walk or drive, and often wind up at a local petrol station. There, on the forecourt, people would drink beer and dance. Often it was forró, maybe samba or carimbó, or simply a blend of whatever people felt like. There was a strong sense of community, she says, of connection to others – even total strangers – by participating in something inherently useless that, nonetheless, brought them great joy. No wonder, she thinks, so many centenarians come from regions of the world that celebrate dance.

Ever since she told me this, I’ve been captivated by the idea. My mind takes me sometimes to a petrol station forecourt, in a city I’ve never been to and whose language I do not speak, where I can dance among the car bonnets and fuel cans and weeds growing out of the concrete, and the music will be loud and the beer will be cold and nobody will know my name and no one will care. I can feel the heat as the day settles, smell the sharp tang of sweat and approaching rain. One day, I promise myself, when all this is over, I will go to that place – an extended dance-break.

In the meantime, I snatch at moments where I can. There are many unfamiliar songs these days; still, I dance to them all. I dance in the car, crawling through traffic, on my way to the hospital where they’ve been operating on my mum. I dance as I argue with the insurance company, as I write detailed notes on my father’s condition, scrub shit once more out of the bathroom carpet. I dance with a friend as we pack up my flat, taping years into sturdy cardboard boxes. I dance while waiting for another cross-continental train, filling out customs forms, working at midnight. I dance between my many strange beds, because I worry that if I don’t, a part of me might break.

This, then, has been my autumn song: a track composed of fragments, its rhythm uncertain. It will change, I know, to a slower, more continuous one, a blend of notes that form a melody resembling something I recognise. In the grand scheme, this too is perhaps a dance-break – not designed for release or elation, but a break in life no less, and one that needs simply to be danced through, because what other choice do we have.

Recently, I met a man who, like my friend J, goes sometimes to a salsa evening. He asked me if I danced and I gave a potted history, laughed away my stumbling efforts at tango, agreed that, if we saw each other again, I might be persuaded to go along with him. We didn’t; I wasn’t. But I think now I might answer his question differently. Because there is dancing, and there is dancing. It doesn’t need a label, a set of configured steps. Very often, we don’t know the lyrics – but where there’s a melody, there can be movement. So give me a bassline, a heartbeat, a rhythm. And tell me: do you dance?