It was 11pm on a Wednesday and I was standing in my kitchen in socks and a t-shirt that predated at least one major life decision.
I'd been washing up. The kind of mindless, warm-water washing up that your brain uses as a runway for strange impulses. And the impulse, on this particular Wednesday, was to put on a song. Not background music — a specific song. The one that lives somewhere in my ribcage and has since I was nineteen and heard it for the first time in a car with the windows down and the volume doing things that were probably illegal.
I put it on. Full volume. In my kitchen. At 11pm on a Wednesday.
And I danced.
Now, when I say "danced," I want to be very clear about what I do not mean. I do not mean anything that would be recognisable as dancing to anyone who has studied or practised or even casually observed dance. I mean the formless, graceless, full-body expression that happens when nobody is watching and the music is right and your body suddenly remembers that it has parts that move in ways you've been too self-conscious to let them move since roughly the age of fourteen.
I moved my hips. I moved my arms. I did a thing with my shoulders that I'm fairly confident has no name. I spun once, caught myself on the counter, kept going. I closed my eyes for the chorus and my body just did whatever it was going to do and I let it and it was — and I know this word is overused, but I mean it precisely — joyful.
Four minutes. The length of the song. Four minutes of completely unwitnessed, unjudged, untracked, unmeasurable movement.
And then it ended and I stood there, slightly out of breath, slightly sweaty, grinning at the washing up like someone who'd gotten away with something.
Here's what I keep thinking about: when was the last time I moved like that? Not the last time I exercised — that's different, that's on the calendar and has metrics. The last time I moved for the pure animal pleasure of my body doing something it enjoyed. The last time movement wasn't a workout or a commute or a task but just... expression. The body saying something that the mouth couldn't.
Years, probably. Maybe a decade. Since a wedding dance floor, maybe, after enough drinks to suppress the committee in my head that normally vetoes any movement more expressive than a brisk walk. We outsource our dancing to alcohol because we've been taught that our sober bodies moving freely is somehow embarrassing. Like joy needs a permission slip and three glasses of wine counts as one.
But that Wednesday kitchen dance was sober. Completely, embarrassingly sober. And it was better than any dance floor I've been on, because there was no audience to manage. No concern about whether I looked good or cool or coordinated. Just me and the song and the specific electricity that runs through your body when the music hits the frequency that your bones seem to remember.
I've started doing it regularly. Not as a practice. Not as exercise. Just as a thing that happens when the impulse arrives and the kitchen is empty and a song comes on that my body needs to answer. Sometimes it's two in the afternoon. Sometimes it's midnight. Sometimes it's thirty seconds of swaying while the kettle boils. Sometimes it's three songs deep with the volume up and the neighbours probably judging.
It's not a workout. My watch doesn't know what to do with it. It occasionally registers as "other activity" which is technically accurate — it is activity, and it is very much other.
What it is, more than anything, is a reminder. That my body isn't just a thing I transport my brain around in. It has its own intelligence, its own memory, its own capacity for expression that doesn't go through the approval process of my conscious mind. When the music is right and the self-consciousness is off, my body knows exactly what to do. It's always known. I just kept asking it to wait.
Your kitchen is right there. Your phone has the song. Nobody has to know.
Put it on.