Dancing to Forget
I wrote this essay shortly after returning home to Mississippi from Yale in March of 2020 due to the coronavirus’s impending entry into our American way of life. It is a piece of fiction based off real events — a portrait of landscape that might never change even if it inflicts lasting marks on the characters that inhabit it. In the end, it is a meditation on who I am, where I come from, and the people I call home.
Sometimes, I forget I am 19. I look around my room and see a myriad of distinctions: Mr. Amory High School, two tennis state championship banners, the baseball that I threw as the first pitch of the 2019 3rd round playoff series , pictures with my friends after graduation. And I wonder has my moment passed me by?
I should be forgiven for these thoughts, especially given my family trajectory. At my age, both of my brothers were busy training in bootcamp to serve our country. But here I was at my desk on an unexpected trip home, feeling too old to be here but sad I can’t rewind the clock.
The Coronavirus has yet to make a large impact on my community, but it already has been a gut-punch for me. It has reminded me of who I was and forced me to question who I will become.
I sat at my desk that night for what felt like hours, staring at the wall. But I didn’t see the now muted grey paintjob or even the 1990s wallpaper I grew up with. Rather, I saw all those long nights with friends, state championships and sports games, stress from a due assignment. The truth is….I saw a past life. Suddenly, it screamed out to me, not as a mere hallucination, but through the voice of my best friend, Davis.
“Jump in your car right now. We are hanging in the Walmart parking lot in 10.”
There is no better hangout spot in rural America than the Walmart parking lot it seems. And sure enough, all my hometown friends got the memo. We all had the same tendencies, smiles, and voices, but our words and the way we carried ourselves was different. In the last year, we all had left Amory in some form, and it left us.
But as we all sat on the hoods of our high school rides, everyone flashed subtle smiles and small words, both expressing a reserved relief to be, at least for a moment, living our past lives.
Some country song we all remembered from our dirt road childhoods but couldn’t quite remember all of the words to blasted from Davis’s truck stereo, and him and Jami, our original high school sweethearts, took the stage, dancing under the parking lot streetlamp.
Everyone hummed the melody of that country song into the cool night breeze, but I hummed a different tune.
“Some dance to remember, some dance to forget…”
As I exhaled and looked at the starry sky, I had to accept that I didn’t know what I was dancing for. But it seemed certain that the pandemic surge headed our way would force us all to find out soon enough.