but for you it's free

disco balls + their reflections

The only thing I have to wrap my now tasteless chewing gum in is a tampon that’s fallen out of its paper in the bottom of my bag and dry-bloomed like a lily. I make do, and slip the whole contraption in my pocket. I also make the executive decision that, since everyone else in this bar has had the same idea about red scarves this season, I’m going to have to take mine off. It only works if you’re the sole sporter of crimson around your neck like a dripping gash. At least the coordination tells me I’m supposed to be in this room, where we’ve all had the same idea about our Wednesday night and our winter wardrobes. It’s nice to feel a sense of belonging, even if it is at the cost of my individuality complex.

I’m early to the gig, which I normally never am. Typically, I like to show up excruciatingly close to the main set, so late that I end up standing at the back with a view of twenty identical haircuts, a quarter of the drum kit, a blinding strobe, and little else. Not tonight, though. Tonight I have time to buy a glass of wine, and find myself a clear view. It’s a standing space next to the world’s most annoying couple, who spend the opener’s set making fun of her accent and her song titles and the fact that she wants to sing about her feelings, more loudly than I think they mean to. Based on the performed nonchalance they both reek of, this can’t be more than a first or second date, where they both still have to pretend to be too cool and too above it all to enjoy themselves. Go home then, I think, barely able to hear the singer over their trying to out-quip one another. I sip my wine.

I’m not innocent of secreting animosity myself, in this crowded pub where everyone’s sodden coats and shoes are drying sleet-drip into the breath we’re bating. My own animosity is driven inward, turned back on itself. It’s born from aimless dread. It’s that familiar feeling that something is going wrong, that I have something to be afraid of, but I can’t remember what it is. I’m trying to drink at the same rate that the blossoming ache in the pit of my stomach is coming into focus, but it’s a close race. Running my finger back and forth against the measuring line halfway up the wine glass that feels like a cut, feels like it’s shaving the pad of my thumb away. Sanding down the print.

And then a hand appears through the crowd for me to warm between my own, and I’m no longer alone, and the clouds lift.

We turn to ice in the smoking area between sets, exchanging victories from the day, feeding one another shivering charm, floating back inside when the drums start up again. I’m coaxed to stand on the shining leather sofa at the back of the room for a better view, which I do, holding onto him and the wall intermittently to make up for my complete lack of surefootedness. My boots are high, my second glass of wine is gone, the room is hazy with smoke and lilac light and I can’t tell how far away the floor is. Someone’s started singing, a different woman, whose tone is even more melancholic but I feel decidedly good now, so it’s all going to be okay.

Bleating saxophone plunges, I think, dig right to the core of me. It’s a guaranteed way to get my attention. Over its cry, she sings about reckoning with her bloodline and her connection to her home, about sitting on the grass under the Angel of the North and wondering what to do with yourself. Out of everyone in this room in Stepney, I’m possibly the only one to have ever taken part in the pastime she describes. I’m certainly the only one to have cheered when she named her home town, which felt surprisingly lonely for what was supposed to be a fun, tipsy gesture. Even now, as she vocalises between confessions of disconnect, I feel outperformed in my connection to that home in the North East. I want to be able to put into words how hard it is to feel proud of where you’re from, despite having always had one foot out of the door. Instead I cry hot tears, that don’t quite match my setting but escape in the refuge of its darkness, and all I can think is I swear I used to be braver than this.

When it passes I’m bereft of anything that could resemble foreboding, and without knowing whether it’s against all odds or by design, I feel lighter than I have in a long while. My elevation and the footprints I’m leaving on the furniture (which has definitely seen worse, from what I can tell in this dark) are in vain. I’m not using my vantage point to look at the stage in the corner. Instead, I’m staring in the opposite direction at a slowly rotating disco ball. I think they’re configured to spin leisurely enough to be reminiscent of every image of a gently turning earth we’ve ever been fed. The strobe reflected as a crescent down the meridian. At its centre, a sun winking gold, spitting out rays that haze their wake. When I finally turn my attention back to the front, the afterimage blinks a dark shape like a mask onto the singer’s face, like a cartoon robber.

Even with my head turned I can still see the disco ball spinning out of the corner of my eye. It’s an image I’ve seen countless times, like turning the corner in a gallery to see a painting you’ve looked at endlessly online but never in the flesh, and I don’t want the shadow printed onto my vision to fade. The way my eyes insist on noting the absence of the bright light I was gaping at. I think it’s the most dazzling thing I’ve ever seen.

See. I can write happy things.

I ask him do you know we have a pattern to our cheering? I always yell high and long and then you shout yeah and then I do the same again but short and melodic. He hadn’t noticed that. And then I find this concept so captivating that I go to write it down in my phone like it’s profound, so preoccupied by the near-incoherent words I’m typing that the spell of the disco ball breaks momentarily. At which point I accidentally insert a table in my notes page and can’t figure out how to delete it and I decide that I’m probably done with all that.

There’s always been something in the depths of me that’s thought it safer to lie in a in the sediment and wait for the fossil to form around me; to dam my own inlet. There’s always been that chest-heaving urge to brace in the face of no threat. Always the coveting that’s kept itself cats-cradled beyond movement. But for you it’s free.

There are days like this, sometimes, and nights, that feel refractive. Something about the way the light hits bathing everything in a peaceful glow. When I was too young to realise that high highs weren’t the opposite of low lows (they were, instead, companions), I used to live for the feeling of oxytocin that’d flood me when I spent enough time under the gaze of a loved one. I felt it too strongly, and when it was absent, would wish I had some way of mainlining that neurochemical.

But now, glittering gems that they are, I can live with gratitude that the moments appear at all. And little else. No desperation to stay hovering in that limbo of bliss, no expectation that the rug is about to be pulled from under me at any minute. I know that the alternative has to be contentment, and for contentment to mean anything it has to be challenged sometimes.

I know that the disco ball would still be turning in its slow dance if I wasn’t there to be dazzled by it. The feeling will ebb and flow like an ocean, like a song, swelling at instances, surging to spilling-point, but always retracting eventually. It’s in this mapping of the harmony between curves that I float, off of this stained sofa that I stumble, into these arms that I throw myself for comfort now. Knowing that anything I try to hold onto with a tight grip will be taken away from me twice as fast. Knowing that I don’t have to tie myself to any feeling for it to want me.

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