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Someone recently asked me if I knew where to go dancing in New York, and I said I had no clue. I wasn’t exaggerating—all the places I used to dance in have closed.
There was the gay bar in Bed-Stuy that had a little stage by the DJ. The backyard was closed when it was cold out, and the walls would sweat. In Greenpoint, there was a piano bar where a dance party started at midnight every Saturday. Dancing on the piano itself was frowned upon, though known to happen.
Those places hadn’t been there for very long; to others, they were probably the shitty newcomers in their neighborhoods, moving into whatever was there before. To me, they were important. People who’ve been here for longer have told me that’s what it’s always been like, living in New York: Your site of mourning is someone else’s happening. But the other intractable fact of moving here, along with its constant change, I thought, were its certain immutabilities. That if you were an outsider, there were certain things you had to get with or get out. And one of the biggest was that you don’t really have any idea what will happen to you here.
Now it feels like the city is unmoored from this stubbornness, filled with all the same stores and condos so that it looks like everywhere and nowhere, like a joyless Las Vegas. I think my response to this evolution (which is surely long-standing, if accelerated) has been to make my New York smaller. It’s also a part of getting older, I guess. I go to work, I go home; what I don’t do is go “out,” that nebulous, addled term for a night during which you deliberately want to end up in a place you haven’t picked yet. Lost, also, is the dancing.
Those years feel truly bygone when what they really are is only recently departed. Part of it is because my technological life is so different now, even though it hasn’t been so long. The spontaneity of “out” has been replaced with control, a slick, grid organization of nearly every aspect of socializing, meeting people, dating. Instagram beams everyone into each other’s rooms without them ever having to brave the train. But with convenience comes boredom and a sudden, panicked awareness of your finite amount of time here, here being anywhere.
This feeling isn’t exactly nostalgia, not quite, though that’s another salve. Nostalgia is too static conceptually: You’re longing for something particular, because you know it so thoroughly, and it comforts. In “remember that time when,” time has a start and a finish, like watching an old movie. What I’m missing is the opposite, an openness, a past but one defined by its orientation to the future.
I figured out what to call it this week, sort of. At least, I figured out what it sounds like. I was listening to Robyn’s new album, Honey, her first in eight years, which is out today.
In 2010, when Body Talk, Robyn’s last record, came out, I was 20. My friend Claire and her older sister Molly were the biggest Robyn fans I knew. At college in Connecticut, Claire and I listened to it so often that we knew every lyric, every tiny uptick in the beat and each time the bass came in, every trill in Robyn’s voice. Body Talk was a perfect mix of glittery, gnarly angst and vulnerable terror that mirrored our lives at that time, as we were figuring out how to be real people, where big shattering revelations came on dance floors, in conversations with each other shouted over the noise of a party. “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do,” which can only be described as a robot empowerment anthem, outlined all the things we weren’t supposed to be doing and did anyway, our frustrations and ailments: “My drinking is killing me . . . My phone is killing me / My email is killing me . . . Your nagging is killing me . . . PMS is killing me.” Our favorite song to listen to together was “Hang With Me” because it had the best harmonies. We sang it at the top of our lungs during the last week of school before graduation, driving somewhere along the highway with the windows of the car rolled down. I don’t remember where we were going, but we were hungover and the breeze felt good. “And if you do me right / I’m gonna do right by you / And if you keep it tight / I’m gonna confide in you.”
Being around Claire was like having my own Robyn, sometimes; she had the same wiry little body, luminescent skin. She cut her hair short during her semester abroad in Bologna, Italy, and left it longer on one side in the front like a foxtail. Later, it became blue, then silver. She shopped at Savers and wore Dr. Martens with geometric-patterned tops, funky dresses. And she had a kind of Robyn voice, a clear soprano but with emotional heft, a wryness that walked the line between sweet and wicked. She was an unselfconscious dancer; she made the most of all her limbs.
Molly texted me when the first single from Honey came out to tell me that Robyn had called it “Missing U.” The title felt like it was almost a kindness she had given to us specifically, like she had prepared those who loved Claire for what it would be like to finally listen to Robyn again without her. When I did, it wasn’t just about remembering the time before she died and dancing with her, which, of course, it was. The second I heard “Missing U” start, its synth beats falling like a shiny rain until Robyn sings, “Baby, it’s so real to me, now that it’s over / The space where you used to be / Your head on my shoulder,” I felt the loss of her crater in me again.
But what hurt even more was thinking to myself, “She would have loved this.” This is a tense you find yourself using a lot when you talk about a dead person. What they would have thought of this current event, this movie, this dress, this sandwich. “Would have” belongs in a grammatical group called the past unreal conditionals, and the name reveals the utter cruelty in their construction. You imagine what the person you miss would have thought of some such thing because you can’t know—that’s the unreal part. It’s why sometimes when others say it to you, you hear how inane it sounds, and you want them to stop: “She would have loved this.” Part of me says harshly to myself, “But she can’t,” and thinks maybe I don’t want to listen at all.
But then I do, and I feel connected to Claire, even if it’s by swimming through the gulf of pain it unleashes. When you move on from the locus of grief, sometimes when it slices at you again, it’s as good as taking a hit of a powerful drug. The frenetic lyrics of “Honey” describe this over a subdued but unrelenting beat, with dreamy tones and a faraway sounding Robyn singing, “At the heart of some kind of flower / Stuck in glitter, strands of saliva / Won’t you get me right where the hurt is?”
After Body Talk, Robyn and her longtime partner separated for a while; then she lost her collaborator and friend Christian Falk to pancreatic cancer. Honey is an elegy to those people, but it is also a lament for the things that never got to be in the first place. “All of the plans we made that never happened,” she sings in “Missing U.” “I keep digging through our waste of time.” Another name for the past unreal conditional tense, of which “would have” is a part, is “modals of lost opportunity.” What you really want when you lose someone is to have their future back, in all its uncertainty and messiness. I miss the exhilaration of the unknown, for her. That’s, of course, the difference between a death and a break-up or just losing touch—I would give anything to get a text from Claire about Honey, what her favorite track is. But I know that when I say “She would have loved this,” I’m just talking to myself. “This part of you / This clock that stopped / This residue / It’s all I’ve got.” Still, I can’t stop listening.
I have one memory that’s fuzzy because it’s from a night when I was stumbling drunk, soon after moving to New York. That was when we used to traverse the whole city to meet up for dancing, in frigid and sweltering weather. In my mind, I’m at a birthday party at a bar on Avenue D and the dance floor is so packed I can’t find anyone I’ve come with, or, at least, I’ve convinced myself they’re gone. All of a sudden, I see Claire’s head bobbing in the crowd. She takes me to the side of the room against the wall where we can breathe, and she holds my hand. The music pounds, and I know I must look crazy, tear-streaked, but with a big smile on my face from being found.