The best thing about ballet class is the sound of the suede sole of my gym shoe swiping over the parquet floor in a tendu or a dégagé. Some of the other women wear socks. One wears silk slippers. It’s not the same.
I am here for the sounds. And for the feel of the wooden bar on my palm and my fingers. My mother took me out of ballet class when I was eight. She said I wasn’t good enough, and that I didn’t practice enough. (I suspect we were suddenly broke. Again.)
So now as an adult – as a mature adult – there is no hope I will ever be a good dancer in any objective sense. And that’s fine, because the challenge now – the lesson I am learning – is how to give it my all (giving in to the fantasy of swans in flight, extending, and shamelessly allowing myself a physical expression free of my own judgement). knowing that I will never be good enough, even in my own mind.
I’m learning to hold the bar gently.
Like singing in the shower, dancing in this room should be a kind of alternative reality. When I was a kid, I would imagine that I was Alice in Wonderland, in my grandmother’s 8 meter by 8 meter yard with its prim lawn and its single, spindly tree. It was my own ballet. What was sparse became lush in my imagination. But now I hear the sighs of the women next to me. I see my own reflection in the mirror. This is what they mean about losing our imaginative capabilities, isn’t it? Then again, I was always alone in Wonderland. Alone in front of the mirror in Grandma’s guest room, in her shortie nightie that reached my calves, and flowed like a ballerina’s dress.
But after those days my real flights were always on paper. The sound of graphite swiping over a white paper. The syncopated ripping of a page being torn from a journal and destroyed.
willfully lost since
the most wonderful places
are ephemeral
Oh, those flights of fancy that we thought were too immature to keep. But they are probably still somewhere in our minds, if only we could find them again. But looking for them might take us into mazes we don't want to inhabit. The past can be a dangerous country.
You're such a great writer. And that's a lofty goal—to give your all to something you know you'll never be good at. I used to love picking up my guitar every morning. Now, my sucking annoys even me.