Not the empty, echoing silence of the void.
The full, ringing silence of a mind that has temporarily stopped warring with itself.
And these shoes.
These impossible, birthday, Parisian shoes that grip the floor as if they were grown rather than made, that respond to the micro-adjustments of my weight with an immediacy that makes the boundary between shoe and skin feel arbitrary—these shoes have added something to the dance that I didn’t expect. Not just technical superiority, though they provide that in abundance. Something less quantifiable. Something that feels likesignificance.
As if being gifted these shoes on my birthday marks the beginning of something.
A change.
A chance.
The kind I’ve been craving without letting myself name the craving.
I doubt it.
I always doubt it.
Hope is a debt I can’t afford to accrue in a place where the interest rate is measured in blood.
But it’s so easy to get lost.
In the passion, in the movement, in the way my body speaks a language that my mouth has forgotten. The music carries me through the next sequence without conscious choreographic decision—improvised now, the technique so deeply embedded that the improvisationistechnique, each movement emerging from the one before it with the organic inevitability of aconversation between my body and the sound. I bend. I stretch. I turn. I rise and fall and fill the empty stage with the only honest thing I have left to offer a world that has tried very creatively to take everything else.
Took an intermission
And though I was missin’ you
I’m so glad we made it through
I would never turn you away
The pre-chorus returns, layered now, the harmonies building beneath the melody like foundations being laid for something that hasn’t revealed its full shape yet. I channel the build into the physicality of the routine—my movements expanding, occupying more of the stage, my extensions reaching higher, my turns carrying more speed and more precision as the music demands more from me and my body rises to meet the demand with an eagerness that surprises the part of me that woke up this morning disappointed to be alive.
The body wants to live.
Even when the mind is ambivalent.
The body dances, and fights, and heals, and reaches for beauty with a stubbornness that no amount of emotional numbness can override.
Maybe that’s the real lesson.
Not that I’m alive despite wanting otherwise.
But that some part of me—the part that dances, the part that responds to Hawk’s scent, the part that held those ballet shoes against her chest this morning and almost cried—wants to be.
The chorus arrives.
Completed, ooo
I needed you
Our pieces glued
It’s me and you
The melody opens like a door, and my body walks through it.
