Dance Marathons and Moving On

When I was little, my family used to joke that I was an elephant because of my memory. I would see someone wearing a shirt and cite a day years ago on which they wore the same thing. For years I’ve had better recall of the books my mother has read than she herself does. I sometimes joke that half the things I say are references to something, to some obscure line from a TV show that only I remember or to a throwback to some anecdote a friend told me weeks ago.

Part of my passion for binge-watching comes from the ability to draw connections, to notice the little moments of overlap between shows filmed years apart. I’m sure most of our generation remember the tossed-around fertility statue at the iconic party in “Mean Girls,” but I’ve seen that exact same moment appear in two television shows, at least one of which came before “Mean Girls.”

As an important element of my queer education, I recently finished binging “The L Word,” Ilene Chaiken’s quintessential story of a group of lesbians living in Los Angeles. In the final season, several lingering tensions between characters eventually boil over into physical violence during a 12-hour dance marathon hosted to raise money for the Los Angeles Lesbian and Gay Youth Center. It is impossible, at least for me, to consider dance marathons on television without hearkening back to the vintage-inspired dance marathon held in the beloved Stars Hollow of “Gilmore Girls.” The physical closeness and emotional exhaustion of such events creates a perfect setting for relationships to explode. Naturally, both dance marathons end in breakups. Watching Alice and Tasha of “The L Word” (whom I’d grown to love deeply over the past two seasons) reach a romantic impasse as they received the Last Couple Standing award, I recalled vividly the tear-streaked face of Rory Gilmore as her long-time boyfriend Dean dumped her and stormed off.

These moments were inevitable, but there’s somehow something tragic about heartbreak on the dance floor. Moments of triumph and tension are both harrowing and memorable; they fold public spectacle and an abnormal setting into the breakup to create a perfect storm of moments to remember and re-remember in perpetuity.

I don’t remember the moment of my breakup with my last boyfriend. It felt a long time coming, I suppose, my own pulling-away inevitable as I watched him continue to try to love me the way he had before. I was not Rory Gilmore or Tasha Williams, falling in love with the new-in-town bad boy or the kindhearted activist. There was no one else, and perhaps that’s why for the life of me I can’t recall the words I used. I’m not used to my memory failing me like this.

There’s an episode of “How I Met Your Mother” where Ted gives his friend Barney lessons in how to date Robin, Ted’s ex. When Robin finds out (and is understandably unamused), she confronts Ted. He says to her in response, “It’s funny; when you date someone, it’s like you’re taking one long course on who that person is, and then when you break up, all that stuff becomes useless. It’s the emotional equivalent of an English degree.”

As a Folklore and Mythology major, I can relate. My mind is full of tales of a family in Cuba I’ll probably never meet. I still have his colorblindness, his favorite professors, his past girlfriends, the way he told me he loved me (till we were dust and bone). The hardest part of breaking up wasn’t so much losing him as it was realizing that I had a metaphorical box of stuff that belonged to him stored on a shelf in my mind—and that I didn’t know what the hell to do with it.

At the end of the dance marathon, when the last couple standing breaks up and the crowd goes home, the credits usually roll. Rory moves on with Jess, Alice finds Jenny Schecter’s body, and the world keeps going. TV doesn’t have room for mopping the sweat up off the floor, for the messy cleanup, for the little things you leave behind.

Hours before my last breakup, I put on a necklace I hadn’t worn in years. “Amor Fati,” it reads. Love your fate. As we held each other, crying, she asked me what it meant. “What a necklace,” she said. Breakups are something of an act of untangling, of breaking out of hold, of taking off the number and throwing it away. Just as the music stops, things end, and all you want to do is sleep. Moving on looks like waking up. It’s nursing the blisters and hanging up the costume. But there will always be another dance marathon. And we’ll do it all over again.