VIII: Sforzando | Uncomposed: "To Memorialize Touch"
The scene was New York, January: we took the train in and wandered around the city, stepping into clothing and candy shops, even a church. For lunch we found a small pizzeria, and the television was turned to the news, volume on high talking about the coronavirus in China. It could easily have been a scene to begin a pandemic movie, with the young, dumb teenagers in a well-lit place, laughing, eating, talking, invincible. Hours of quiet joy before the fall.
We left and walked through Central Park, climbing rocks and taking photographs. It meant nothing in the moment how close strangers sat to one another on the rocks. No one afraid of breathing the same air. A man played “Autumn Leaves” on the saxophone. Little details, small joys like that were just part of the tableau, passing through us like the notes of the sax on the evening air. I thought we’d be able to take them for granted for the rest of our lives.
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During our post-exam week off, my roommate and I took a tango class, switching partners with every new move. What a love is this, dancing with strangers, moving in unison, learning the steps to lead and to follow without once glancing down. Walking back from class my roommate and I would compare notes on the small tensions in the bodies of our partners, the suggestions of next steps, each partner turning the other so precisely that the dance would have flowed just as smoothly with four eyes closed.
It hurts now to think about that skin on skin, the scent in the crook of friends’ necks, precious now despite once being given and taken so freely. Maybe there’s a story here about illness or about suffering, love or touch, healing or care, or about all of them intertwined like an embrace.
Once, in an art museum, I saw a few panels of a graphic novel by James Romberger and David Wojnarowicz. Two men sit on a hospital bed, one ill with AIDS. As they hold each other, their bones begin to show. Their skin is blue, muscles bright pink, guts orange, sinew red. Their bodies glow like gardens. The caption reads:
It makes me weep to feel the history of you on your flesh beneath my hands at a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.
As innumerable people die in hospitals now—alone, terrified, without their families—I find myself returning again and again to the tenderness of those words and that image. Maybe this is all we can do for the ones we love when we know we can’t save them: validate the existence of their bodies, present and undeniable. Cherish their attempts to move closer to us. Remember them.
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There’s a documentary in which the filmmakers interview a 100-year-old Japanese woman. She attributes her long life to a group of friends she’s kept for years who visit each other when they’re sick: steady human contact, a lack of skin hunger, holding one another like whole rests. As the virus spread to Japan, I e-mailed my grandparents there. It hadn’t yet hit where they live, they said. I needn’t worry about them. They were enjoying themselves in the garden, flowers blooming, sun singing honey on their faces—because, despite everything, it was still spring.
Even still I couldn’t help but think that they had to miss the once-daily visitors to their home, the friends they treated with such care. I couldn’t even remember the last time they’d been alone for this length of time—together, yes, but still marred by so much distance. It was only then that I realized I wouldn’t be visiting them that summer like I do every year, and it was only then that the crashing hurt fully hit me. My grandmother had attached in the email a recording of her voice, singing in the car, asking if I knew the song. I listened to it over and over. There was a love in that, in holding the music to remember the touch. Because there had to be. There had to be.
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I found out the university was sending us home for the rest of the year at an ice cream shop in town. The sky was dark on the walk back, and the music deafening: the sound of people on the phone with their parents and friends, frantic, crying, reaching out to one another. Something had opened in the world like a wound, and we had no idea when or even if it would close. In that screaming uncertainty all we could do was scramble to memorialize touch.
The next day, I headed to the student center with my roommate to collect our final pieces of mail before we left. On the way back we’d pick up storage boxes. In front of us on the path we found pages of a book pasted in the dirt. Someone had to have torn them out the night before, leaving them covered in muck, pressed to the ground, something to remain when we were gone. I could only make out a few words on the pages—blue dreams, magic mushrooms. My roommate laughed when I took a photo, but there was a desperation in the act. I had to remember what was around me.
It was gorgeous that day, sunny—though of course, that only made the sink to evening more open to revelry. The university had warned us we could be arrested for gathering but still we buried ourselves in joy for a few selfish nights, scraping all we could out of the time we had left. People ran to keep their bodies tame, searched for every secret before the leaving. A traffic cone in the hallway, too much alcohol and too much disbelief, yelling, regret. Racing to have sex. Bottles smashing outside my window. I didn’t even realize it was dawn until I heard the birds. They’d never sung so out of tune.
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I’m bad at throwing things away, which means I’m worse at packing: I’d kept so many loose sheets of paper from high school, old poems, essays, all stuffed into my allotted four cardboard boxes. I started off fine, until I found a journal entry from when I was seven years old in which I’d written that I didn’t understand the point of a journal, since I didn’t keep secrets. After that I could barely see straight. I packed so clumsily that a friend had to come over, help me dump out all four of my boxes and rearrange their contents like a malfunctioning game of Tetris. Echoes of my grandmother’s song played in my head: do you know this one? It was the most soothed I’d felt all week.
People left in a rush but I can still recall snapshots, broken shards of fear and want. Trader Joe’s vodka on the dresser. Shattered glass on the ground. Dust under the bed in an empty room, soap in the caddy, clothes in a plastic bag, floor-length mirrors left leaning against walls, rolls of tape on the floor, houseplants abandoned in the hallways. In the noise and the sharp changing landscape I found myself in a haze of wandering campus, doing my best to memorize it for later. Singing friends, arms around one another. A sculpture on fire outside the dorm. My roommate’s purple lips after a full bottle of wine. I never did get to tango with her after our class ended.
We arranged our days around the times when others would leave, and no one tried to play it cool. There was a mythos in that, the desperation without embarrassment, the knowing-in-our-bones that this was now or never. Our lives had been so carefully planned, those plans so carefully cherished. Now we sang with risk while we could. The split between physical contact and the fear of it: teeth almost pricking the neck, caught one breath from breaking skin. It had once been so easy to take each other’s presence for granted, but now touch was more than touch. It was an answer to blue dreams, to magic mushrooms, a song hummed in an empty car and sent as an email attachment. We answered each other with heads raised to the music, arms lifted into shadow. One tear, one note away, one hospital bed away: an embrace.
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(Uncomposed is a column, originally written by Lydia Eileen and now by Hana Widerman, that explores the music in the moments of daily life where we don’t think to search for it—intersecting to form new meaning and nuanced dialogue. This column, along with two more by the HM team and dozens more pieces of art, music, and writing by contributors, is published in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VIII: Sforzando. It is available for preorder now.)