The Body, the Mother, Music, and the Right Place

There’s a show on Netflix called Show Exploder, and in the last couple of days, I’ve watched the episode on The Killers three times. The show focuses on the song When You Were Young, and the reason I keep watching it is because I am coaching someone from the desert and I love her writing, and I think this show is telling me something she needs to hear. I am also listening to it because I think it’s about my writing, too, and because my body tells I need to keep listening—my body is so thirsty for the experience of this show—the shots of Las Vegas, the musicians talking so earnestly about their work, and the song. My body thinks this song sounds like a prayer and my mind wants to figure out why.

There’s a part where Brandon Flowers and Ronnie Vannucci are talking about how they developed a guitar line that figures prominently in the song. They play it, and Brandon says, “…that guitar line, that sounds like the desert,” and there’s something about that guitar line, something about the fact that these men found the music that sounds like home to them that made me cry all three times I heard it—and the countless other times I circled back 30 seconds and listened again. Brandon said, “The desert’s mysterious. It made us realize how much a part of this place we are, and we wanted to hone in on that on the record.”

I heard You Don’t Look Adopted before I wrote it. It had to do with mystery and the emotions and thoughts and my body, and it was a kind of vibration I could listen to inside myself that helped decide what word should go next. I’m working on a sequel to You Don’t Look Adopted, but I can’t hear it yet, so I just keep throwing sentences and paragraphs out there, like someone hitting a ball with a racket waiting to hit the sweet spot.

I read that human bodies are 99.9999999999999 empty space. I don’t get it. How can so much space feel this much anxiety and tension? I mean, there are plenty of nights when I can’t fall asleep because it feels as if my body’s at the starting line of a race, waiting for the gun to go off so my body can spring into action and try to beat all those invisible people who are lined up there on some track in the dark of night with me.

Supposedly atoms are 99.9999999999999 empty space. When I read more about this, what I learned was that “empty” does not mean “nothing”, and that “empty” space contains things such as wave functions, volumeless electrons, and invisible quantum fields, and that, somehow, the volumeless electron is simultaneously everywhere in an atom.

This all means that I’ve never touched anything solid since the solid part of my atom is inside the nuclei, and that what I’m feeling is the electromagnetic force of my electrons pushing away the electrons of another person or thing—maybe you! So when I think we’re getting close when I take your hand in mine or you take mine in yours, we’re not actually touching each other’s solid selves—we are touching each other’s resistance. If I understand all of this correctly, what is “empty” in atoms and in bodies is actually “energy” and so your resistance is not nothing.

It occurred to me in a new way this morning that the body that created me is a stranger to me. That for nine months I lived inside a body I do not know. I feel like this is why I can’t dance. I can’t sync my body to a song to get it to move in a way that is balanced or that proves that my body hears the beat. I feel like this is why I always feel like a train not straight on its tracks.

What if when a baby is born, it is like an instrument that needs to be tuned alongside the body of its mother? I think one reason we don’t really know how relinquishment and adoption affects a body is because we don’t have the words or the concepts to describe what happens. I’m going to try to describe this to you, and you might say it sounds “weird” or “out there” and dismiss it because it doesn’t align with your experiences. But could you try? I really want to try to tell you this thing. I want you to know what it feels like to be a violin that’s out of tune, but only the violin can feel it. The listener thinks the violin sounds fine, but the strings know something is off. The strings know they need the right person to really hear and tune them.

I have the feeling that now I am an adult, if I learn to slow down and really listen to both the world and my body, I can find things and thoughts and people that resonate with the chords I carry in my guts, in my heart, in my soul. The trick is to stop listening to other people as much as my nervous system told me to when I was growing up (listen! something might be wrong! they might give you up! you have to pay attention!!!!) and learn to listen to myself.

Something happens in my body when I hear the beginning notes of The Fly by U2. Sometimes happens when I hear Vivaldi open up the show Chef’s Table. Something happens when I hear my daughter’s voice, or the sound of her breathing. Something happens when I hear my dog eating. It’s like I am clicking into the right place. All of these things make me feel like a wick that has been touched by a lit match. All of these things can bring me to tears. I think one way I can deal with the trauma of adoption is by listening to the world and to my body, and looking for resonance.

I was raised by a culture that fears emptiness. But what if that is where all the energy is? What if that’s where love resides?