I Want / A Place to Stay
When everything in your life changes, what do you do? Well, I went out
“People sing along, they know the lyrics. Well, not all the lyrics. Most think Manuela [Ya Kid K] sings ‘I want, a place to stay’, but she sings ‘Awa, a place to stay.’ ‘Awa’ is Swahili (or Lingala, I'm not sure) for ‘a place to stay, a home’.” — Jo Bogaert, producer of “Pump Up the Jam,” talking about the song in 2020, quoted in Move Your Body (2 The 90's): Unlimited Eurodance by Juha Soininem (2020)
“After he left I cried for a week. And then I realized I do have faith — faith in myself.” — Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City s1e12 “Oh Come All Ye Faithful”
“I tried to dance it away” — Solange Knowles, “Cranes in the Sky”
“And if you lose me, then you'll know I -- I loved you. And I wanted to go on loving you.” — Madeleine Elster, Vertigo (1958)
Bet you’d never thought you’d hear from me again, huh?
In truth, I didn’t think I’d come back either. It’s been a long time. I haven’t quite known what to say. And if I’m being honest, I haven’t felt much like sharing in general. Since I last updated this newsletter (which must have been in 2021) so much has changed in my life that has made me value what little privacy I feel I still have after spending the bulk of my adolescence and young adulthood online, and in pivoting away from journalism, I’ve found the urge to divulge my interiority increasingly vulgar — even inauthentic. This realization was part of the great reckoning I had with myself when I wrote what I intended to be my last personal essay about my identity ever. You can read some of that certainty in the piece itself, some of my frustration, my straining against the form and its demands, and also, hopefully, some of my loss. To be clear, I don’t feel loss from having abandoned a journalistic career (if you can even call it that), in the sense that I don’t miss the way it felt. But I do feel a kind of loss in the unique form of relation that such a position of divulgence tended often to evoke. In other words, while I resented the demand to share and share and share of oneself, I missed what that act of sharing sometimes offered in exchange. In other words, still: I missed you.
The last time I spoke through this newsletter was April 2021. When I read it again now, I ache. In April 2021 I was wrapping up exams at the end of my first year of law school. I was unemployed and feeling so defeated at my lack of prospects. Both doses of the vaccine had yet to arrive, so there was nowhere really to go. I was mere months from being evicted — an event that set in motion so many other dissolutions. That spring became the summer I tried and failed to get top surgery, and the summer I broke my wrist twice. It was the worst summer of my life — until this year, that is.
I’ll just get into it. My boyfriend and I broke up in June of this year. I say “in June” because it took all of June. For about a month afterwards, we didn’t speak and I was reeling, shuffling around like a headless ghost, rattling my chains, wailing noiselessly, aimlessly. He left the city, he left the country. I don’t know where he is now. It’s no longer my business.
How strange it is to say “boyfriend,” when what you mean now is “ex-boyfriend.” It comes so much more naturally, though I suppose he is now truly and properly my ex. But the word “ex-boyfriend” feels wrong, simply because I never knew him that way. The word works only on the absence of its object. And so if I’m telling a story or recalling a memory, I can’t quite bring myself to adjoin that extra syllable — not because I somehow cannot bear to contend with what it represents (or maybe I can’t, who knows), but because that’s just not how I remember it, not how I lived it. In the passenger seat, adjusting the volume; sitting beside him on the bus, my arm around his shoulder; lying next to him in bed, breathing in his exhalation; walking together in the trails by the river, passing a joint. Who was that, the person I shared those moments with? Not only him, but also myself. I was there, I remember it. And don’t I have an obligation to be true to myself?
It would be improper to speak of this breakup like a death, but in some ways, it was, even if only metaphorical. The death of my early and mid twenties, which were devoted to him. The death of my main anchor, my primary referent, my key interlocutor. The death of a relation. I feel as though I have no choice but to invoke the language of loss, however indecent, and it is a loss. And though I’m no longer consumed by it in the way I was for what felt like the interminable bereavement of this past summer, I am still living with it, among it, and I refuse to ignore it. It’s always on the horizon.
What do you do when you lose something so significant, only to replace it with this lingering shadow of love and grief? Around what can you reshape your life? Where can you go?
Well, I went out.
In “Hotline Bling,” Drake (typically) refracts his loss as resentment. He bemoans his ex and her new lifestyle. “Ever since I left the city, you started wearing less and going out more.” Me too, girl. I wore less and went out more. This summer, there was not a single dance floor where you couldn’t find me (or a club bathroom stall where you couldn’t find me and two or three of my closest friends). There isn’t the time or space here to write my full thoughts on Toronto nightlife, but suffice to say, I did my very best with the available options. I threw myself into a social world of comparatively fleeting interactions, heat and wetness, loud music, crowds. I wanted to get lost. When you’re consumed by the loss of a significant individual, it can be tempting to devote oneself to finding another individual as a replacement. I attempted this once or twice (wouldn’t recommend), but instead I found much greater support in the experience of obliteration, of giving oneself over to a collective experience, of closing your eyes and feeling the bass move through you and bodies move around you. And it was through this leaning in — this acceptance of the totality of my feeling, my willingness to be obliterated in the face of it and the energy of the crowd — that over time, from weekend to weekend, my loss transformed.
The other weekend, I went even further out. A group of friends drove for five hours into the woods of rural Ontario for a techno festival. Three days and three nights of omnipresent and stirring bass, a relentless bouncing motion that calmed and unsettled me at once. I couldn’t stay off the dance floor. I stayed up all night, I didn’t want to stop dancing. We sat around the fire, we bathed in the river, we looked at the stars. It wasn’t perfect, but it was what I needed, or at least, some variation on it.
I’d attended another version of that event last year with my boyfriend — or, rather, my ex-boyfriend. Throughout our relationship, we’d attended a lot parties together as well as spent a lot of time on day trips or weekend excursions into the trails and lakes of rural Ontario. At this event I saw lots of people I knew only through him, and not only knew, but knew intimately. These experiences we’d had together, which were now all mine. Though always the passenger, I had become familiar with the roads in and out of Toronto and fanning out into this part of the province and its trails and waterways. The whole weekend, I recognized landmarks from another time, in many meanings of the word. But I didn’t feel sadness. I didn’t feel loss. When I came home at the end of the weekend, I felt that I had been truly partied out. More importantly, though, I felt that I’d accomplished something meteoric, some mission I hadn’t even realized I’d set out to do, and that I had been completed. I had shaken loose the massive, wailing shadow of grief that had settled on me this summer, its ghostly form, its clattering chains. What I had been left with in its place was the rhythmic thump of the bass, and the steady presence of my loss transformed. No longer a ghost, no longer a loss. But a reminder of something beautiful that once was, a reminder that love is possible.
Perversely, I’ve come to love my grief. I recognize it now as a kind of second home, one full of loving memories and long silences, hair and sweat and hands inviting me in, the smell of a kitchen, the feeling of a cat’s whiskers on your legs, the thrill of wind in my hair as I bike to a house where he once lived, no longer. In this way, what was once an all-consuming loss that towered in the distance and filled my lungs and ears has now become a kind of a dance floor companion — a caring presence bouncing along beside me, someone I can look to and rely upon, someone that I can count on, something into which I know I can retreat when I need to get in touch with myself and feel things fully. A place to stay.