The Closest Thing Has Always Been by Emily Mathis

A friend told me she’d never been in love. The friend is a dance friend, a woman in her 40s, divorced, and currently in a long-term relationship. 

“I think the closest thing to being in love I’ve ever felt is when I’m dancing,” she told me.

This friend and I were in New Orleans at a week-long pole dancing workshop focused on embodiment. I was about to turn 35 and a boyfriend I wasn’t sure I was in love with had just moved in with me. When my friend said this to me, I had contrasting thoughts. The first thought was something akin to pitying her: Never been in love? What were we good for if not to be in love? Wasn’t that the whole point of living? To become whole by joining with another? 

The second thought I had: I’ve never been in love either. The closest thing for me too, has only ever been dancing. 

And a third thought: why did both of us say, the closest thing is dancing? Why didn’t we just say, I’ve only ever been in love with dancing?

I am not a professional dancer. Am I a good dancer? It’s taken me a while to say, and to really mean, I don’t really care. I have to be diligent at weeding out thoughts that are not my own. The first thought I had about pitying my friend was not my own so whose was it? Why would I care if other people think I am good at dancing? So the time I spend doing it is validated. By whom? Someone, somewhere, sitting in a booth like a parking attendant?

If you are good at something, talented, it is okay to spend your time doing it; otherwise, what are you wasting your time doing? Whose thoughts are these? Is it too far to say they are no one’s thoughts. They are simply the air we breathe. 

I took dance classes as a child but got kicked out. The teacher said I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. She said I was always laughing. No one ever said maybe I was laughing because I was happy. Maybe I had already fallen in love as a child and felt it ripped away, but when I was 16, I remember falling in love with dancing. I was drinking 40s in a friend’s basement when a guy who had recently confessed his love to me started making out with one of my closest friends. I thought of the guy as a friend. I knew I was not in love with him. But what was he doing? What was she doing? Were they trying to make me jealous? I turned my back to them and started dancing—alone, all night with the music carrying my feet away from whatever it was they were doing. I learned this was always a way one could be—back-turned, lost in your own world, and dancing. I wonder if I was laughing.

I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. As a teenager, I took shrooms at the Doc Watson bluegrass festival and danced for three days to banjos. When I was 18, I moved to New York to go to NYU. 

“What are you going to do in New York?” people from home asked me. I didn’t know and I can’t say for certain now what I thought back then New York was going to be. I can’t say for certain whether it was some vague notion of greater freedom as a woman, or just a person, than Appalachia. I ended up in a basement bar dancing all night to psychedelic trance (psytrance). At 18, we were all trying to figure out who we were and unsure if the world outside of ourselves would determine that we had value. The value came from professors, from bouncers, from lists, from parties, from critics, from each other, from ourselves. The air we breathed was heavy with the constant questioning of value. Was I disappointed by this? Did I wonder back then how free I would ever be if I was always looking for someone else to give me value? 

I don’t think so.  

I was the only one in my circle at NYU who was into psytrance. Sometimes friends would go to psytrance events with me. They only went if they had nothing else to do. They never said if I was a good dancer. They said I was enthusiastic, and I heard in their tone that enthusiasm was not the same as good, it did not hold the same value. What are you wasting your time doing, merely being enthusiastic? 

I’ve tried falling in love with people. I’ve dated enthusiastically. There was one partner I thought I might be in love with because no matter how close I got to their skin, I always wanted to be closer. I wanted to be underneath their skin, inside of their body, but I learned that no matter what, between two people, there was always a line of demarcation. To feel expansive and yet fully held inside of a body—is that what being in love feels like? Because I only know it in dancing. I can only feel that within my own body. 

Another pole dancing friend shared comments from a person commenting on their pole dancing videos. The commentator was “appalled” by the video, “appalled by any woman disrespecting themselves, especially for a man.” But there was no man in the video. It was just a woman dancing. If a woman is dancing, why is a man presumed to be watching? Why can’t it just be a woman dancing? Why is this so hard to imagine? Why is a woman’s body always assumed to be a means to something and never its own ending?

 I spent a decade dancing in the psytrance scene. I was in love with it because I could dance in public, and it felt like no one was watching. No, that isn’t true. I knew people were watching but I still felt safe dancing. I still felt safe in my own body. I felt freedom but also, on some level, I knew that in that scene, that level of enthusiastic freedom equated to value. I wanted then, and still want now, to be watched and valued and my body to still belong to only me. I don’t know if that’s just me, but I don’t think these should be viewed as inherently contradictory feelings. 

Eventually in the psytrance scene, someone was watching, and someone did assume my body belonged to them and not me. The sexual assault had nothing to do with me dancing. Why does this still feel like a radical thing to say? After the assault, I didn’t stop, I kept dancing. Why does this still feel like a victory? 

After the assault, I stopped going to psytrance events. I was nearing thirty and ready to leave the party. I started going to ecstatic dance, 5Rhythms, and then pole dancing. These spaces felt like an after-party. People who still wanted to dance but were tired of the party. At 5Rhythms, a woman in her 60s named Deb had a brassy voice and spoke freely about hating her ex-husband and taking his money. She told me to watch out for an elderly man who didn’t respect boundaries.

 “If he comes up to you, you have to let him know, this is my space. This is my territory. You’re not going to take away my space for dancing,” she told me.

Deb liked to dance in the very center of the dancefloor. Sometimes I watched her when the man who didn’t respect boundaries approached her. She moved her feet in small, tiny circles. She pushed her elbows out to her sides. She didn’t give up any space. If he found a tiny gap to slip through, she stomped her feet, and he stepped back and seemed confused. She danced better than he did, more enthusiastically, and more in love. He stood by uncomfortably and then walked away and she smiled and kept dancing. I think she wanted him to keep watching. I think she wanted him to watch and learn and understand freedom instead of watch and want and try to always be taking. 

Another girlfriend told me Gravity was her favorite space movie. She said it was because Sandra Bullock’s character is a woman with no husband, her only child has died, and so when she becomes untethered in space, by society’s standards (that parking booth attendant) she has no reason to want to come back to Earth. All she has is herself and an individual self is certainly no reason to keep living. In the movie, she is terrified when she first becomes untethered and realizes it is just her and her body. How is she to live with nothing to hold her, nothing to contain her, but her own body? Isn’t the whole point of living to escape the trappings of an individual self? To do this, don’t we have to latch onto something outside of our own bodies? To be good, to have value, doesn’t that have to come from someone outside of oneself? An individual self, a female self, is no reason to keep living. 

In Gravity, Sandra Bullock does not fall out of her body. She does not cease to exist. She is held by her body and within that body she is able to move and float freely, within that body she is able to see the world in its entirety, and with this realization, with nothing but her own body, she falls in love with living.

I want to say I’m sorry to my friend who said she had never been in love and the closet thing has always been dancing. I want to say sorry for that voice in my head that felt pity. I didn’t mean it. Turns out, I wasn’t in love with the boyfriend who moved in. How did I know? Because I have experienced dancing. I have experienced the freedom and the joy of being fully held within a body. My body. The joy and freedom of experiencing living within my body. I do not need to climb into someone else’s body to fully experience living because I already exist in a body. It is the only body, the only parking attendant, that needs to validate how I am living. 

What do I wish I had actually said to my friend when she said the closest thing to being in love she’d ever felt was dancing? I wish I had told her that maybe dancing isn’t the closest thing to being in love. Maybe being in love is the closest thing to dancing. 

Emily Mathis completed her MFA in fiction at University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2023.
In the past year, her nonfiction has been a finalist for Fourth Genre’s Michael Steinberg
Memorial Essay contest, North American Review’s Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction
Prize, the Sixth Annual Sewanee Review Nonfiction contest, the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books
Literary Awards, and Epiphany's Breakout! Prize. Her essays have recently appeared in, or are
forthcoming in, Sonora Review, Bodega, Hunger Mountain, Epiphany, Los Angeles Review,
Another Chicago Magazine, and others. She is revising a collection of essays and seeking
representation. Find her at emilymathiswriting.com or on Instagram@emily_a_mathis.

30 October 2024