Groove is in the Heart

text by Alex Tétreault

It’s hot out.

Downtown is buzzing as the excited masses wander amidst the festive cacophony. A lone woman with orphan headphones dances to the beat of her own key chain. She begins her journey at the panoply of lovers’ locks, which weigh down the bridge over the tracks with their sheer amount of “forevers” frozen in time and space.

On the packed sidewalk of Elgin Street or the snaking paths of Memorial Park, she goes largely unnoticed. Aside from the occasional polite nod, the faintest smirk, or the sincere questions regarding her well being, she is quickly and automatically categorized with the other denizens of those areas.

Lost in her own little universe, she continues her dance, her one-woman bacchanal. Once she crosses the metal fencing however, it’s a whole different set of keys. The context changes everything. Almost instantaneously, festival-goers, already primed by the pulsating of the speakers and the seemingly endless booze from the bar, begin grooving to her beat. For one brief instant, this woman’s love feeds her new-found partners, who feed it right back to her, and so on and so forth in a feedback loop of love.

And then, as quickly as it came, the moment passes, like the others that preceded it and those that will follow it. The concerned parties go their separate ways, the jingling woman continuing her journey. But, this moment remains…magical.

There’s something magical in watching her, so taken by this music that only she can hear, her body feeding off the energy of those around her, her vibe-siphoning headphones plugged into the cosmos. Because we too could hear this music, be fed by this collective energy. We only need to live in these moments of ephemerality when they present themselves, be they a performance, a festival, or even love itself. We each have our own keyring, jingling away in our hearts, longing.