Danez Says They Want to Lose Themself in Bops They Can’t Sing Along To
Photograph by Mengwen Cao
and I’m thinking of the years I spent sweating to the choreo of every K-pop song with a decent dance break, me and the other girls from church, practically saintly in rehearsed our isolations and body rolls, winding and rewinding the tapes, our noses almost grazing the screen, though in truth I only understood maybe about half the words, the other half mostly sounds, which nevertheless sank into my muscles, pathways laid by so many hours of industrious mouthing that now, when humming idly some stupid tune at the sink, I’ll realize for the first time ever what! that line meant (though of course pop everywhere’s a language so reliable it’s nearly nothing, and on babbling loop through the ages), and I’m thinking, too, about how this, my first love of losing myself in the scaffolds and percussives of an unparsed lyric, doomed me for life to never be able to hear, actually hear, the words to any songs, even in English, even my favorites, like Jamila’s, which I put on when I’m adrift and sunken and just need to feel at home in something—even those harbors are built, mostly, of sonics— not gibberish, I mean, but language so sacred it’s not my place to try to decipher it, phonemes holy as stones on a string, mysterious as the names we give to animals, or words we know only in prayer—at Rebecca’s mother’s funeral, for example, where, when invited, I added my small voice to the reciting of the Kaddish, and the perfect thunder of it lifted one part of me higher than air, while rooting another deep into the fragrant earth, a bit of which I later scooped, as gently as I could bear, onto the casket, the shovel heavier than any word I knew, and more full of light than even the birds overhead, who, as we wept, kept, of course, right on saying exactly whatever they needed to say.
