Dance

On Friday night, the curtains went up and I was sat in the Colliseum Theatre watching Swan Lake. It was my first time watching the ballet but it felt more like a really hazy distant memory. Like a sap, I welled up within in the first few seconds of it starting. The music, the set, the tutus, the sequences and more than anything, the Snow Queen blew me away.

It got me thinking about my own dancing hang-ups. I've always loved dancing, I wanted to go to classes when I was little but never had the opportunity. Instead, I would make up my own choreography in my bedroom and dance everyday to my favourite songs. As I got older, I danced less often and well, life got in the way. I stopped excercising altogether until I took up yoga later on, the only other thing that resonated. My body wants to be flexible, graceful and strong in the legs but that all got hindered when I got these nerve problems in my feet, rendering me unable to even walk barefoot around the house.

For 6 years, they've stopped me from doing what I want to and to avoid stepping on painful flooring, I've forgotten what it's like to feel all that energy in my legs and strength in my movements. After a healing session over a week ago, I was told that it is possible for the nerves to regenerate and with some dedication, my feet can be healed. And so my reaction was to scout for an adult beginners ballet class. I've found just the perfect thing, I've found the perfect shoes and soon I'll take my inner child to a dance class and heal my adult self. My legs seem to know it's coming, they're wanting to stretch and bend more in anticipation.

About 3 years ago, I wrote a poem about a dream I had, and it feels more close to me now than it did at the time:

Past Life

I twirled and twirled on my toes

in another time, on another plane.

That floor was mine upon which

I could prance and swish, no longer a wish.

I wore ballerina shoes, soft pink

and spectators were there I think, watching me

I could bend and hop, my body was free to feel

each move, such grace.

Not sure which country or place but I was there

and it was me and I was dancing, spinning like so.

A ballerina I was, a long time ago.

Excerpt

Here's a piece from my unfinished collection that I've been working on, just to give you a taste; I've decided that there'll be prose in there as well as poems. This particular one doesn't have a title yet:

We walk into the bedroom in the dark and you stand amongst my wreck. Black hiding an undressed life and you wander into it as if you have seen it before, even though you don’t see it now, my gallery of posed questions and the paper meals that feed my hunger for answers. You make the room jump when you walk past the mirror. A quick stream of colour flashes back recognition of you more than it does me. And yet I still don’t reach for the light as you carry on going; maybe I’m waiting for you to intuite some more, perhaps show me what I’ve never been able to see.

Our conversation from back there out in the world didn’t follow us in and I’m not sure what to do with the silence. Perhaps it is better to contain it here in the dark; no makeshift words to construct in a space that is already too full. No prompted reactions expected, no critique or applause to await. In this obsidian box I could paint whatever you want, some stars perhaps? Or do you prefer just a navy sky and a clear prominent moon?

I hear you turn on your heel and this actress isn’t yet ready for the lights. She hasn’t rehearsed enough; she might wither before an eager face. I know you were pleased by what you saw at the preview, back there out in the world. I recognise the same smile that freed itself from your lips when I looked up from my glass. Only this time it is decorated with midnight and it looks ever the more beautiful.

Now that you don’t see me, what do you see? See with your heart, feel with your eyes. Peer into me while I’m in nothingness, because you have no present comparison for beauty.

I take one step and pause before the next, one foot teetering behind the other like my thoughts do; carefully laying themselves down. I’m nearly ready to expose you to it all, from young womanhood to present day; storyboards that don’t have endings, shards from dropped feelings never cleaned up. I’m close now because I sense you by your warmth and it changes the air between us.

And before I can tape together the words that would fit right here in this space, you find the switch because those lips that part ways for flattering smiles kiss mine suddenly in the light.