So Far Unnamed Story About a Dancer.

There comes a day in every life where you simply don’t want to face reality anymore; where you have to find some way to lose the person you’re supposed to be; where everything is wrong and the only way to escape is to find what’s right. When this day comes, so many people can do nothing about the horrible feeling that imperfection casts across their bodies and their minds and every bitter thought to tango past their consciousness. I count myself lucky in that I do have an escape. Most of my friends have seen me dance, either in school or after it, at home or out in public, perhaps even at one of the recitals held in the shabby basement of the studio, where they pay five dollars apiece to watch toddlers in tutus followed by my own fancy feet. They all have their own words to describe the workings of these feet. Some call me ‘amazing’, others ‘beautiful’, occasionally ‘fantastic’ or ‘awesome’ or even ‘perfect’.

Beckett called my dances ‘gorgeous’. I don’t know why he always picked that word. He knew that it was a word that I never liked; it was, to me, just another mundane version of the words we use for our girlfriends and wives and daughters and nieces. A word for our beloved. It was never meant to be used for motion.

Then again, Beckett never had quite the right words for anything. The first thing that he ever said to me was, “Why do you have scabs for feet?” This was an accurate observation; we were in sixth grade and I was in the midst of my second month on pointe. Therefore, my feet more or less were scabs. However, our new gym teacher, who had watched as her new class staggered into her sweaty domain after a long day of brand new teachers and classes and a lot of confusion, thought that he was a horrible child and sent him to sit in the corner for the entire first class. Meanwhile, my other classmates shot disgusted looks at my bare, blistered feet but didn’t dare to speak as I pulled on my socks and acted like nothing had happened.\

Years later, Beckett still couldn’t quite get his mouth around the right words. His first girlfriend dumped him after three days of dating because he said that she looked like an “obsolete turtle.” Nobody ever figured out quite what was meant by this; he may have been commenting on the weird, patchy green sweater that she decided to wear to the incredibly formal school banquet that we were all forced to attend upon graduating from eighth grade. Just like his taste in words, Beckett never picked the best girls, either.

But Beckett isn’t here now. He’s somewhere far beyond my grasp, and as far as I’ve been told, I can never have him back. The only consolance of this fact is my retained ability to dance. If I try hard enough, I don’t even remember the way he used to come to my classes, sit in the dirtiest corner of the studio, the one where the paint chips so badly that it would shower into his dusty brown hair, and watch me dance with his green eyes wider than dinner plates. I can forget the way he would shove his hands in his pockets and watch the ground, completely silent, as we shuffled home from the studio every day, parting only when we reached the corner of Dale and Starlings, where I would go one way, back to my two-story home with my yellow-painted bedroom and a drawer full of fresh footie pajamas to protect the blisters on my feet; Beckett would turn toward his two-flat over by the river, where he would pound on the door until his Momma woke up from her usual stupor and let him in. I can forget everything about the tall, broad-shouldered boy and his shriveling soul when I dance.

My mother always tells me that it’d be better to remember him, to honor the boy who meant more to me than anything else in the whole wide world. She liked Beckett well enough, but I don’t think that she understands my need to escape from him. Every time I close my eyes he’s there, watching me, accusing me of things that I know were not my fault. So I beg and plead with my parents to sign me up for more classes, ballet and modern and hip hop and jazz; my life would be better if I could afford a pair of nice tap shoes, wouldn’t it? They purse their lips and mumble about money until Bring Your Family to Class Day comes around. I’m at the top of every one of those classes; not a single foot is in a better place than mine, no arms move more fluently, no hips in a more perfect rhythm.

And so day after day passes in the same pattern. I awake, I dance on the smooth wooden floor of our newly renovated basement, I eat what I can and go to school. I learn, if that’s what one might call it. My mind is usually buzzing too powerfully to pay any attention to what’s going on in my classes. Sometimes in P.E. I wake up for long enough to show off a little bit before sinking back into the mental sleep that I can’t seem to break out of. It’s not that I’m failing my classes, or that none of it makes sense; in fact, I do quite well in school, but it feels as if some robot is doing all of the work for me, and I’m actually trapped far below in a confused blob of feelings. I finish school at three thirty P.M. every day, traipse to my locker, and then walk to the dance studio, where I zombie through five minutes of homework before joining my classes on the studio floor. Here, I am no longer a robot. Here I have a mind of my own and a body of my own, and whatever I tell that body to do, it does. I go straight from Masters Ballet 3 to Modern 5 or Jazz 4. Classes are small and costly here; each student is nearly guaranteed individual attention, but we’re always on the brink of being turned out into the streets as the studio constantly threatens to close. Next, I have an hour to finish my homework before I put my forgivingly non-pointe shoes and my fluffy blue legwarmers on to demonstrate for and sometimes teach the younger kids.

The Studio for All Things Dance has been open for eleven years; coincidentally, I have been taking dance classes for eleven years. The owner, Brianna, or BriBri the Great, is practically my best friend. She’s a tall, slender black woman with corkscrew curls of coppery-chocolate hair generally kept in a set of tight braids and warm, greenish-brown eyes. She was the one who gave me the nickname Jazz, thinking that Juniper Azalea Crow wasn’t a great name for a dancer. When the studio first opened, she was the only teacher, and she taught four classes twice a week. Over the years, she’s gained enough money to hire a few helpers and even advertise here and there; however, the studio has never been anywhere near wealthy or prosperous. Brianna only upholds it out of an utter passion for the art of dance. She refuses to take my babysitting money, claiming that the tuition that I pay is more than enough for me to give my share, but I know that if the studio closed, both of our hearts would be broken, as would those of her ever-growing student clientele.

Today is one of the better days for the studio. It’s the first day of the fall session, and every one of the kiddie classes is twice as full as it was last session. There’s no guarantee that any of those students will stick with it for any more than a year or two, but every once in a while you can see the special gleam in an eye, the perfect turn of a foot, the ecstatic smile when a move is executed perfectly. That’s why I love to help Brianna and Daniel with the little kids, to see those that might someday inherit my place. Sometimes I wonder if that’s a place they’d want to inherit.

Life is a balance, and to fall is easier even than it may seem.