My sister, with dimpled cheeks plump with youth and eyes rounded with childlike wonder, once looked at a rain darkened sky and said,
“It looks like God is having a dance party.”
The words surprised me, initially because our family did not exactly have a concept of God. We didn’t go to church, we knew nothing of scriptures, I didn’t even think we owned a Bible. God was little more than a word used to emphasize sentiments true believers would probably clutch their pearls at. What did my baby sister know of God?
Beyond that, it seemed like quite the marvel that she could see something so innocent in a storm. We lived in South Florida, where the tropical rain battered the state with heavy fists for most of the year. It might have even been hurricane season when those clustering bruise-colored clouds had innocuous names like Andrew, Wilma, or Katrina. But she looked at the sky and saw a dance party. Claps of thunder were the rhythmic shuffling of feet. Lightning had been transformed into strobing lights cutting through darkness. She wore a dreamy little smile that made me think she had understood something I was too grown up to grasp.
Those words came to me now at a time when my life is one big storm after another. These storms don’t seem to have much of a name, or a place where clouds part to allow for the sun to take center stage.
But they strike with the force of a hurricane.
Thunder that rattles bones and gnashes teeth. Gale force winds that set my heart to racing. Lightning fills every sliver of my brain until it pours down nerves that catch fire under the strain.
Years of storms.
Years of living in the shadows of head trauma.
Years of migraines, of neuralgia, of,
“You’re just anxious, sweetie. Take some meds and find yourself a therapist.”
Years of doing as I was told and suffering the storms anyway. Clean scans, bloodwork mostly normal — nothing wrong to be found.
(Maybe it’s the doctors who are wrong.)
My face — grown more angular in adulthood and struggles with eating because of pain, because I often simply cannot find the energy — has become home to a mask of bravery. Raindrops have fallen in moments hidden away, in moments I could not shutter my windows quickly enough. The mask has become swollen and brittle, less capable of hiding the truth that strikes discomfort in those that see it.
Could my baby sister have witnessed such a storm and saw a dance party, too? Maybe not now, when youth has been traded for adulthood and an inability to believe in magic. She, like me, would surely only see lightning and its potential to devastate.
And yet still, I find myself wondering, could these storms indeed be like God’s dance party? Maybe the lightning in these moments is the music — my frantic, convulsive movements are me being led in a dance by unseen hands. It’s a dance I have done hundreds, if not thousands of times. But I cannot remember the steps. Or, rather, I don’t want to remember the steps. They are quick and jarring and downright frightening. No matter how many times I deny the invitation, God keeps dragging me out onto the dance floor.
“You didn’t have me before,” She tells me. “You always came to the party alone.”
She was right, of course. She was there. I just couldn’t see Her because we only truly met about eight years ago. And even then, I was so jaded by my years’ spent weathering these storms that I could not accept Her in full. I thought She was just punishing me.
“You punish yourself,” She says, “going off into a storm with no protection.”
What protection was there for me?
“Faith.”
Ah, faith. That intangible phenomena born of the soul. Now, I have explored my fair share of spiritual, metaphysical, and mystical teachings. I had struggled to see how to make any of that matter when my body felt like it was constantly under attack. My soul had gotten shipped out in a broken down vehicle facing friendly fire. When a life is spent in the trenches of survival, where is there room for faith?
“In all that space you made for fear.”
Boy, was there a lot of that.
I was afraid of how the pain felt, or what it was like to have no control of my body. I was afraid that I was nothing more than a burden to my loved ones. I was afraid that good days would inevitably be cut short, that storms were all I would be and know. I wanted to live but couldn’t see how, and that thought haunted me.
“You always came to the party alone,” She had said. What She meant was that I had gone in without faith. Well, that was simply because I didn’t know what that really even meant. You might remember how I mentioned there being no concept of God in my family — faith and God go hand in hand, right?
“But you felt God in your sister’s words that day,” She says.
Since she quite literally said God, yes. But…was it more than that? Did the surprise caused by those strangely poignant words create enough pause in the mundane for a seed to wriggle its way into the fertile soil of my subconscious? A seed left to weather turbulent conditions until it broke open and became something new.
Rain can be destructive, but it can also create new life. Pain can be devastating but it can also grow a fierce strength and hope — if there is faith.
Perhaps the so-called “dance party” in my case isn’t a South Beach night club, but an ecstatic ritual — there is the thundering of drums and the flash of fire light. And God, who had been whispering in my ear for years, dances with me. She lulls me into a trance, a space where Her voice and faith ring clearly — as long as I am not afraid to find them. There is suffering but I know it must mean something as it led me to Her.
“Follow my lead,” She says, “and just let go.”
So, I do.
xx
Nykhia
