Step to the Beat of My Heart

Les gens qui dansent, sont les gens qui vivent.

Aurora Henry had always been somewhat of an oddity, pretty much from the day she was born. In a house that was overpopulated by creatures of the child species, she had always preferred to be alone, despite the fact that, being the baby of eight, she was always doted on by her older siblings. But Aurora had quickly tired of the attention that came with being the youngest - by the time she was four or so, she’d figured out that the best way to escape all the cheek-pinching and the hair-tousling was to just avoid people altogether.

So she would hole herself up in her room, happy to play dolls by herself and play both the father and the mother in rousing games of ‘House’, only ever emerging at mealtimes, if even then. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her family - like all young children, her family was the closest thing to her that she had - but it was more that she could be just as content by herself as she was with other people. And she wasn’t completely antisocial, either, just a little bit of a loner.

Her parents worried, of course, as most parents do. They tried their best to force her way into social situations: signing her up for soccer and basketball and horse riding lessons and everything they could to get her to interact with other people. But the harder they tried, the father they pushed their daughter away from those situations, and the more afraid they made her become of those situations: until she took her first ballet class.

She first walked into a dance studio at the age of five - with really no idea what she was doing. All that Aurora knew was that there were people, lots of people, and that they stared at her as she walked in, pudgy hands clinging tightly to her fathers’. Years later, Aurora could still remember the long, thick walls that separated her from the dancers, the curling, fading pink wallpaper on those walls; that stiff, artificial and slightly stale smell of roses that even then she knew had to had come from a bottle - but most of all, she remembered the music. The music that floated underneath the cracks of the studio doors and slipped its way into her ears was probably the only reason she began dancing in the first place - for that music, that simple, three-chord piano pattern that struggled tremendously to suffocate its way through the broad walls, made her want to move, and move now.

And so she did. She moved, and she danced - without coordination, at first, but over time her gestures began to flow cleaner, her legs moved faster, and her dances, though created by someone else, appeared crisper, smoother, and more fluent. It was as if she had begun the learning of a new language: the vocabulary of dance in the memorization of positions and the names of steps, the grammar in the familiarizing of how to string the words of dance together in a fluid, seamless sequence, and the overall apprehensiveness in the ability to create dance sentences, so to speak, using not only techniques learned, but also ideas and visions fabricated of one’s own capability.

And that was how she was born, that dancing girl. She was born in the corridor of a stuffy, overpriced and quickly deteriorating dance studio that, to this day, she could not remember the name of. But the name wasn’t important - the only thing of importance was that once she had slipped on those little ballet slippers at five years old, she’d only taken them off in exchange for pointe ones at twelve. The only thing of importance was that, thanks to that little studio, Aurora had begun dancing, and she had never stopped.