Polyrhythms

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Polyrhythms” by Carolyn Zhao. Carolyn is a writer, editor, and chronic workaholic based out of NYC. She writes primarily science fiction and fantasy, and her work has been published in Clarkesworld Magazine. “Polyrhythms” is her first non-fiction piece.

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When I was in college, I took up dancing to get over my stage fright. This was a calculated decision, but also a leap of unbridled confidence. I hadn’t danced since I was a child, after I broke my nose during a Christmas ballet show (silk socks, polished floors), and there was no reason to believe that I was going to be any good at it now. But I wanted to stop hyperventilating whenever I was in public. I wanted it badly enough that the other alternative was to kill myself. I wish I could say that I was always logical as an 18-year-old, or that I am always logical now, but that would not be true. I had to get over myself, or it was death.

So three times a week, I went to the local dance team practices and forced my body to move. It turned out well—sometimes I’d finish practice and leave with my heart pounding, loud and light, thrilled with the aftershocks of fear. Sometimes I’d end up curled against the bathroom wall retching with my hand over my mouth. It was about a 70-30 split of life and death, which were pretty good odds to me.

Stopping dance wasn’t a logical decision either. I kept dancing for four years straight, until one day I wanted to go to a class and realized that I couldn’t. I stared at the class pass on my phone ($20) and stood in my room until the start time ticked by. I remember thinking: Is this because I was raped? Then I thought: No, don’t be stupid. You can’t let him win. If you stop dancing, it means he’s finished the job.

#

In medical school, I played disco music in Anatomy lab. We were taught to use the cadaver’s names, or to refer to them otherwise as “the donor.” This went on even as we hammered through clavicles, lifted out brains from vats, and peeled away skin to expose gleaming tendon beneath. On the day we sawed through the pelvic bone, a second-year offered to speak with anyone who needed support. I found myself wandering over after we were done. At Orientation, I found he was a dancer, too. He did house, I did disco. So we didn’t talk about the cadavers, blood, bone. Instead we talked about dance.

“Do you know a new studio’s opened up?” He asked me. It was just 20 minutes away from campus and the new instructor’s baby. I had looked up all the studios in Chicago before stepping foot on campus, I didn’t say. But I did tell him I knew the studio. I knew the instructor, too, for the record, and the second-year looked at me in surprise, and I told him. Surprise to shock. Shock to dismay.

“I had no idea,” he said. “That’s awful,” and “If only I’d known,” etc.

Don’t we all wish we could have known? Sometimes I imagine people with billboards around their necks that say, DANCER, or RAPIST, or, or CAN’T STOP LYING, or HYPOCRITE. I didn’t say that out loud, of course. Instead I told him that people were full of surprises.

#

I tried to kill myself halfway through my first year at med school, actually. I’d written the plan onto my laptop, like credits from a movie screen. Though I didn’t consider myself suicidal, I got as far as drafting suicide notes before I walked downstairs and told my sister that she should check my packages. She called my therapist and everything turned out okay, and by “okay” I mean that I’m alive and my body is intact, whole, and well.

The code of wellness in medical school is unspoken. Sometimes, in Anatomy lab, I put on songs for my team to keep ourselves moving, keep the room’s spirits high, and keep our feet from going numb. I always put on disco, which to me was the music of life. Ultimately being “well” was required for every activity. We walked from lecture to lab, lab to the library, and studied for tests by pure memory and took exams every 10 days or two weeks—whichever was shorter with the weekend involved.

When I was “well,” I’d planned on writing in the mornings instead of running. Except it was impossible. It wasn’t so much a lack of time than brainspace, because I’d sit down with my laptop and simply stare at the screen, my head filled with diagrams of arteries, veins, and muscle insertions.

“You could dance,” my boyfriend suggested over the phone. “Dance always makes you happier.”

He wasn’t wrong. It always does. But I told him I was tired all the time, and that the studio was never free anyways.

I didn’t know if that was true. I didn’t bother to check. I lied because I couldn’t bring myself to tell him of the incautious thoughts I’d been having about killing myself. I couldn’t tell him that every weekend, I’d go out into the city and walk into a store and imagine being shot by someone I knew—someone whose face I could picture, who would shoot me out of revenge, out of well-placed hate, out of a destruction he had yet to finish. The visions would flicker like reels of film. I was in the lab, listening to music. I was at a grocery store, bleeding out on the ground. One day I went on a run and was convinced I was going to be chased.

Where does fear begin? Where does paranoia end? Without realizing it, I’d tipped myself over the edge of logical into the ridiculous, my therapist said. Perhaps I was conflating my childhood fear with my adult ones. Perhaps violence was what I naturally expected after a lifetime of Adverse Childhood Experiences.

What do you say to that? It wasn’t gaslighting. I could see her point, and I hated that term anyways. She had the face of logic, after all. I had a face of fear.

#

Lies I tell to myself frequently: time is linear. Time flows like water. There are high points after the low and my family will not miss me and neither will my boyfriend. Some things can’t be undone. My dog will learn to stop waiting for me. My therapist knows me as well as I know myself. Med school is only as hard as everyone says it is, and all the cadavers were loved once, and I can never dance again. I’m safe. I’m in danger. I am in danger.

#

Dancing is about a sense of polyrhythm. One part of the body moves to one beat, perhaps three-time, while another part moves subconsciously to a beat of four. Polyrhythms are a lifelong skill, like riding a bicycle or learning to run. Once you can do it, you can’t forget. This is another lie, of course. When parts of the brain are lobotomized, you can certainly forget how to walk, run, dance. Still, I thought, on the day I planned to kill myself: still, there are things that someone simply cannot run away from. Memory is one: that restless past. And two: the enduring cliche, which is that you cannot outrun yourself.

Memory loops itself into my work. In the months before medical school, I took up writing in science fiction and fantasy: the ultimate method of escaping the self through the self. I wanted to write about dragons and spirits and people who could drag themselves (heroically) across a desert of ice, but I couldn’t. I wrote about a girl who kept getting stuck in loops of time.

When my boyfriend said the story was “so personal,” I didn’t know how to answer him. I wanted to say something like, “all writing is personal,” or, “fiction is just fiction,” but I wanted to know why I kept revisiting events as well. Was there something keeping me here? A self-serving, navel-gazing method of writing a self-confession, unique to women only? Survivors of domestic abuse only? Survivors of sexual assault only?

In a perfect world, I would have taken up running in medical school to replace dance. Beyond its inherent torture, running is apparently a state of constant flow. The mind quiets as the body moves. Flow is the ideal state my therapist wants me to achieve: flow in myself, my writing, my living in the now. In running, I’d be lost in the nothingness of achievement, where the final endpoint of my journey could be too far to reach. Just run! Everyone says. The proof is in the doing. The thinking must be unthought.

#

In the two years after college, I slept with a pillow wedged between my legs to get rid of the feeling of being raped. My dance instructor was 29, and I was 19.

Afterwards, I kept dancing. I didn’t know how to stop, but I deleted all the text messages between me and him as if it had never happened. And if I stopped dancing, I felt like he would’ve won. Afterwards, I told my friends, one of whom the instructor would interrogate two years later for my location. My friend refused to tell him where I was.

Acts of kindness and strength move me greater than acts of tragedy. I think of my friend over video call, looking the instructor in the face, and telling him that he didn’t know where I’d gone or when I’d be back in Chicago. “I was really scared, Carolyn,” my friend told me later. “He looked really mad.”

#

I didn’t realize the instructor was going down his contacts to find me. But people are full of surprises. Some two years out of college, right after COVID, I called the instructor’s workplace and told the boss what he’d done. I felt justified to do it because the boss was the instructor’s friend. They had all just posted about how much they loved the dance community in Chicago (the instructor was still teaching), and how they’d hoped to continue keeping it safe and welcoming (the instructor had assaulted another woman, too). So I told him.

I had the receipts to show for the therapy sessions I attended, the police reports I filed, the conversations I had with other women he’d hurt. “I can’t believe this,” the boss said. He had a wide, gentle face. “It’s just such a shock.”

It probably is. Like I said: who holds up a red billboard around their neck that says “RAPIST” when they are also A) a good instructor, B) someone who loves children, and C) a beloved friend? All of the above can be true on an exam. To his credit, the boss did believe me in a gratifying way. An intervention was staged, and nothing posted to Instagram (they wanted to respect his privacy).

I suppose this would’ve been the end had the instructor not tried to track me down. “Where is she?” he asked my friends. Why do you want to find her? They asked him back.

I wasn’t anywhere he could reach me, thankfully, and all my friends told him so. But I do think about that phone call, and about him coming upstairs to the old apartment that I’d moved out of, and about him murdering me. My life was in tatters then, on the inside, so there was nothing stopping him from finishing the job. I would’ve done it myself. “Totally not real,” my therapist said then. But reality and unreality lie together on a line.

One ends where the other begins. The unreal can certainly become too real.

#

The instructor runs that same large dance studio now, I told the second-year student. Some of his previous team members, who knew what happened, chose to split ways with him. Some of his other team members, who also knew what happened, chose to stay friends.

“I had no idea,” the second-year repeated.

Inside the lab, the cadavers have their names pasted on the walls. I never cried over the bodies, but sometimes I’d go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet and push my palms into my eyes. I suppose you never get over it in some way, but once I did, I became in charge of snapping on the scalpel blades. The body then was not so much human as a simple meat case.

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In science fiction, it is impossible not to interrogate the separation of the mind and body, or the self and unself. In my favorite book The Left Hand of Darkness, there is no rape on the planet Winter, simply because there are no biological males and females on the planet. The race is one of perfect androgynes. In the final third, however, the human and inhuman are united in their joint love for life—a trek across a desert of ice, where they starve and suffer and survive and bring Winter into a greater planetary purpose.

My life, with writing, has purpose as well. Writing is the only way I can divorce myself from my body under a method of (im)perfect control. The soul is the mind on paper. But no matter how much I try, I know I can’t shake it—the reality that I am myself inside myself.

For example, when I run, I always try to start at a good time. My body is young and fit. My shoes are new and soft. But even after all these months, I still don’t know what music to put on, what clothes to wear, or what route to take, or if someone male is looking at me while I run and thinking he’d like to catch me.

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Dancers are acutely aware of what they look like. The method behind their confidence is practice. You have to practice enough so that when you let loose—when you enter flow—you are still in total control. Passion is one way to train this. Living in fear is not.

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I don’t think anyone particularly likes to live in fear. One burrows into fear the same way one might burrow into a coat. Living in fear is what happens when the body outruns the mind, when every corner is somewhere your brain thinks, “here I will be shot dead,” and when the purpose of life itself is to remember to live—to escape to a greater goal beyond survival. I don’t think there is an escape from fear. Deliverance, maybe. But escaping from fear acknowledges that the fear is ever-present and always there. The concept of escape only exists when the concept of fear exists, too.

#

Truthfully, I still don’t consider myself suicidal, but I wasn’t lying about wanting to die either. I quit medical school on health-related terms, and in the mornings, I make my bed instead of dancing. I’m still in therapy (lots), I’m still trying to write (also lots), and on some days, I still walk past a studio, or a man with a dull orange beanie, and feel a flash of fear. Does it ever end? I think: will it ever?

My hunch is that it won’t. And I’m fine with that. Really. Every few days my boyfriend asks me to do small dance workouts with him on YouTube. People play top 40s music and wiggle their bodies in bright yoga outfits. We copy them, and it’s nothing like the stuff I used to do: battles, cyphers, practices, and so on. Wiggling together makes me happy. Laughing together makes me feel light.

And what am I going to do anyways, if I don’t dance? Stand on the outskirts of weddings, refuse to make unbridled leaps? I reject the idea that I should refuse life. I reject the idea that I should never move or even stand still. And I won’t forget the care packages my med school classmates have sent me, or how scared my friend sounded over the phone, or how my boyfriend wanted to kill someone when he found out. Who’s remembering that but me? I’m the only one who’s still hurting anymore, and progress isn’t linear. Time isn’t either. The polyrhythms, the remembering—I just can’t put it down some days, because it just makes me so fucking angry. It makes me want to open the window.

I’ll fill my lungs like I’m about to jump, like I’m about to make the greatest leap of my life, but instead of jumping I’ll just scream:

I’m alive! I AM ALIVE!