Halftime and the Ache for Home
An Impromptu Reflection on Bad Bunny, Longing and the Unforgettable
La vida es una fiesta que un día termina,
Y fuiste tú mi baile inolvidable.
Life is a party that one day ends,
And you were my unforgettable dance.
-Bad Bunny
This is an impromptu essay, written in the long shadow of the Super Bowl. Which is to say, it’s excessive, slightly off-key, and probably unnecessary.
Like most things attached to this night.
I know not everyone loves the halftime show. I know not everyone knows who Bad Bunny is, or why a song in Spanish should command this much attention. That’s fair. I’m not here to argue for fandom. I’m here because one song keeps returning to me, quietly, the way certain things do when they matter more than we expect.
The song is called Baile Inolvidable. The translation is simple enough: the unforgettable dance. On the surface, it sounds like a love song. Maybe it is. But some phrases carry more weight than their definitions. An unforgettable dance isn’t just a good night. It isn’t just chemistry or youth or timing. It’s the kind of joy that lodges itself in the body. The kind that leaves tenderness behind. A sweetness that aches.
When I hear that phrase, I don’t think of nostalgia so much as recognition. Like the song is pointing toward something we’ve all felt but rarely say out loud.
If I’m honest, Bad Bunny isn’t usually my kind of music. I admire him, but I didn’t grow up with his sound. He even remixed Un Verano en Nueva York, and while I smiled at that, my heart still leans toward the old El Gran Combo version. It feels worn-in, like a kitchen table that’s held a thousand conversations. Scratched. Faithful. Still standing.
And yet.
When I see Bad Bunny perform, when I hear the drum, the conga, the güiro, the horns, something in me wakes up. Not preference. Memory. My heart recognizes the rhythm before my mind gets a vote. It’s not cognition so much as re-cognition. A knowing again. The kind that happens in the chest before it reaches the brain.
My body remembers something my tastes never learned how to explain.
That’s what surprises me. The way this music pulls something ancestral without feeling stuck in the past. Fresh, but old. New, but familiar. Maybe that’s why it reaches across generations. Not because it belongs to everyone, but because it remembers something many of us have forgotten.
That feeling carries particular weight for Puerto Ricans, especially those living far from the island. Diaspora sharpens longing. It teaches people how to live with more than one sense of home, and sometimes with the quiet grief of knowing you may never fully return to the place that formed you.
For many Puerto Ricans watching the Super Bowl from the mainland, this song doesn’t just sound good. It sounds like memory. Like cultural muscle memory. A rhythm learned early and carried across water. Into apartments with thin walls. Into cars headed to work before sunrise. Into kitchens where Spanish is spoken softer than it once was.
An unforgettable dance becomes a way of saying: we come from somewhere, even when we’re scattered, even when returning feels complicated or impossible.
But I don’t think this ache belongs only to Puerto Ricans. I think they’re simply naming it clearly.
Beneath the language barrier and cultural specificity, there’s a more universal pull. A longing for a place that feels truer than the one we’re standing in. A sense that we belong to something larger, older, and more whole. A feeling that visits us through music, through story, through moments that feel briefly complete.
The unforgettable dance isn’t about going backward. It’s about remembering what home felt like before we learned to call that desire unrealistic.
That longing shows up in stories we loved before we knew why. Like the moment in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when a small mouse sails east, past the edge of the known world. Reepicheep isn’t running from anything. He’s answering something. When the time comes, he lays down his sword and drifts forward toward a country he’s never seen but somehow knows.
The scene doesn’t feel heroic so much as familiar. We recognize that movement.
The quiet courage of trusting a pull we can’t fully explain.
What undoes me is that Reepicheep doesn’t fight his way home. He releases his way there. He stops defending himself against the world and allows himself to be carried. Which feels, if I’m honest, like faith at its most stripped down. No altar. No certainty. No answers. Just the courage to stop bracing.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks noticed something similar in a very different register. In Awakenings, he writes about patients who, after years of dormancy, briefly awaken and reveal something astonishing. Beneath illness. Beneath time. Beneath adult conditioning. There remains a preserved aliveness.
A childlike self that hasn’t disappeared. It’s waiting.
The body remembers joy. The nervous system remembers wholeness.
Longing isn’t imagination run wild.
It’s memory looking for its address.
That’s why the biblical language no longer sounds abstract to me. The Epistle to the Hebrews describes people of faith as strangers and exiles, those who confess they’re seeking a better country. I used to hear that as a dismissal of this world. Now I hear it as honesty about the ache. A naming of the feeling that this place, as beautiful as it is, doesn’t fully satisfy us.
Not because it’s broken beyond repair, but because it’s incomplete.
Faith, in this sense, isn’t about escaping the earth. It’s about admitting we recognize a music we didn’t invent.
Which brings me back to the dance. To Bad Bunny, on one of the largest stages in the world, offering a song rooted in an island shaped by displacement, resilience, and a joy that refuses to disappear. To Puerto Ricans in the diaspora feeling that rhythm strike somewhere deep. And to the rest of us, whether we know the language or not, sensing something stir anyway.
The unforgettable dance isn’t a performance. It’s participation. It’s the moment when the body says yes before the mind finishes its objections.
Contemplative writer Thomas Merton called this the cosmic dance. The realization that we are already moving within a vast choreography of belonging. That holiness isn’t found by leaving the world, but by learning how to step into its rhythm with attention and humility.
The dance doesn’t erase our wounds. It teaches us how to move with them.
Near the end of his life, Ram Dass offered a sentence that feels less like wisdom and more like recognition: we are just walking each other home. Not leading. Not rescuing. Just walking. Together.
Maybe that’s what the unforgettable dance is really about. Not escape. Not nostalgia. But companionship. A way of recognizing one another by the way we lean toward the same horizon. A way of putting down our swords, even briefly, and trusting the rhythm that keeps pulling us forward.
Even if we don’t know the song’s name.
Even if we’re counting under our breath.
Even if all we can do is keep moving together.
Daniel. Great essay (as usual). It reminded me of the need to connect with the often-forgotten elderly in our society and church family. We need to remember that they are the ones who taught us how to love and how to dance. We need to build bridges to them so we can indeed walk home together. Thanks for being and sharing who you are.
Beautiful article, Daniel. This longing I recognize in my body and not my mind is real and I can trust it.