Go on dancing

Anticipating an August of change

Riverdale Park in Toronto, July 2022.

I’m sitting on a lone patio chair, looking out onto a crossing made chaotic by construction. The chair is metal and uncomfortable. Its coldness presses into the small of my back as I sip at my iced coffee, tasting grains. The coffee tastes burnt and the day is overcast. There’s a wetness in the air that dampens my upper lip. It’s an unromantic, blunt moment and I feel it sitting on my chest, on the space where anxiety lives. I can’t tell if the discomfort is on my skin or under it.

I feel uncentered these days.  I imagine myself as a small child with a small, uncertain grip, trying and failing to hold on. I’m moving to a new city in a few weeks and while l’m taking as much comfort as I can in the long, July days—cherishing this season where the sun gives generously and time is forgetful—the weeks pass so quickly they blur. 

The move will take me into a new job that I wanted desperately in January of last year, when I applied. It’s an objectively exciting opportunity for a young lawyer and I’ve tried hard to embody the 20-something professional woman on TikTok, wearing Dior lips and Aritzia trousers, ready to win at life one corporate job at a time. I buy a navy suit with a smooth, satin trim and there are tears on my face when it comes in the mail, smelling expensive, as if its arrival is too strong a flavour of reality. An offensive proof that I really do have to leave. How can something you once wanted so badly sting this sharply when it arrives? The force of it making your eyes water, like the stale and strong wind of a passing train?

It’s a one-year contract that will temporarily take me away from my home in Toronto. Which is to say: from the person I will one day marry, from my best friends, from the shopfronts I frequent and the sidewalks I’ve committed to memory. This apartment I furnished with pieces I cherish and flowers I trim with care and that one cocktail at that bar in our favourite neighbourhood. I get the sense I’m pressing pause just before the crescendo, in favour of a strange and unfamiliar music. 

And, wow, what a privilege to be nervous about… what? Opportunity? Stop complaining, Ramna. Don’t be one of those people others feel sorry for, so willing to choose comfort and familiarity over a new adventure. It’s just a year, after all. What’s a year? A blip? A blink? I’m lucky I can afford this, that I got the job I competed for. I’m lucky that so little time away from here feels so big, I tell myself. It must mean here is good. 

But I also know I’m afraid of my life forgetting my place in it. Standing still in a lonely city as the people I love go on dancing elsewhere. Maybe, in the beginning, an empty spot where I would be. But eventually, the dance becoming fluid again, absorbing the emptiness, swallowing it. Everyone’s feet floating over the spot shaped like me.

Laptop balanced on my knees, the internet falters slightly as my therapist explains my feelings back to me and her words come out jumbled, a hiccup of static. She shakes her head and instead of an organic motion, it’s spliced and robotic. It makes the truth of what she says feel flimsy. I catch only parts. Do I feel like people love me because I’m just there? Because it’s convenient? I think she says something else then, maybe offering some answers, but the sound cuts out. All I hear is the questions, floating from my computer to the ceiling and hanging there, waiting, cold and delicate. 

I make a list of the errands needing to be done before I leave, wanting to put order to my restlessness. 

• Change forwarding address 

• Cancel magazine subscription 

• Copy keys 

I sense my throat tense and I instantly regret starting this list. Suddenly I don’t want to tie up loose ends. I want to leave them loose. Maybe if I don’t copy the keys or empty the refrigerator or clear out the mailbox, I’ll never have to go. It’ll be like I never had to. 

I remember my therapist asking me to write down only the facts when it feels like feelings are fogging my vision. Write down only what you know to be true. It’ll help separate your irrational mind from the rational, she says.

I make a new bullet point in my errands list.

• I wouldn’t forget about the people I love the way I fear being forgotten. I would wait diligently for their return and remain connected and remind them of my commitment and love them from afar and find new ways to make space for them in new seasons of their lives. These are natural choices I would make for the people I love. These are just the motions that come with loving, like turning to someone at the sound of their laugh. These are choices others are happy to make for me too. I don’t love people because they’re next to me and it’s convenient. I love them because I just do, weightlessly, without burden, here and there, now and tomorrow. I am not difficult to love. 

I add a period to this last sentence and leave my pen pressing into the paper a little too long. The extra ink makes a tiny wet dome and the period becomes darker than the rest. Like a small, dark sun, it makes the statement before it feel brighter. Truer. I am not difficult to love. I reread my list, these things I need to remember, and I don’t feel a magical sense of calm or an automatic clarity, but I do feel my chest loosen slightly. I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding. It feels so good.

I haven’t packed yet. It’s still a few weeks away and I don’t have much to take. I want to spend this in-between time cashing in on this life and this place, overspending on this joy. I want to make people I love laugh. Maybe before I go, when my suit is folded away and the books I like to reread are making the bottom of my suitcase heavy, I’ll pull those questions from the ceiling and pack them away too. Somewhere safe and hidden, like the jeans I’ve outgrown, not sure if I’ll ever need them again.  

In every letter, I’ll answer a question asked by anyone. The question could be about anything. The answer will always be honest. 

When I was 16, I was hurt by someone I trusted. Afterward, they told me that that’s what it meant to love someone—that sometimes the love was so big that our bodies confused it for anger. That people in love can do stupid things when they’re angry. I was young and I believed them.

The feeling of being a young, Pakistani girl, navigating life on my own, no one to confide in. That was the most afraid I can remember being. The world felt unbearably big and I felt lost in a long tunnel.

Much later, I realized it taught me what love isn’t. It taught me that I can be the person for my baby sisters that I wished I had then: someone who knows how things work, how to straddle the divide between cultures and selves, how to survive. It taught me that not every experience has to be a teaching moment—I was resilient for what I endured but, at 16, I shouldn’t have had to be. Kids don’t need to be resilient. They just need to be kids.

Writing this, I’m the woman now that 16-year-old me dreamed of being. The scared teen girl is still in me, but now I’m careful to brush her hair and ask how she’s doing and write down all her anxious thoughts, reading them aloud until they sound like nothing at all. Fear has changed faces and become vulnerability.

I practice showing this to the person I love. He tells me it’s safe. I’m no longer young and I believe him. It taught me that this is what love is.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado