Prologue

We are five years old when we begin to learn the ritual of ballet. At first, clinging to the barre, we feel scared of our bodies, which seem to be unpredictable and hard to control. Everything feels jerky and unnatural, and even in our tiny - practically toddler aged minds - we wonder if this is something we’re really interested in at all. It seems much easier to play soccer or learn to sing. And yet, the allure of ballet is hard to resist. Not many mothers can ignore the image of their daughter clad in a tutu, so it is almost a rite of passage to walk your daughter through those double glass doors and into this new world wrapped in satin, sweat, and fairytales. By the time our mothers realize that ballet might not be all it's cracked up to be - we are hooked. We no longer rush out of the studio after class into their arms but linger to watch the older girls, wishing for the day we can master our bodies into something beautiful. We dream with our toes pointed, we live our lives trying to float through the world with the lightest of touches. Our iron-grip on the barre softens until we no longer need it. Evolution happens, even in a ballet studio.

Our mothers no longer carefully observe from the doorway. As we have been accepted into this world, they have also been cast out. They sew their love into our pointe shoe ribbons and drop us off in the parking lot, and each time we step across the threshold we become less of a daugher and more of a creature bent into shape by stories of the ballerinas that came before. This is your legacy, they tell us, gesturing up at the black and white framed photographs on the wall. This is what you’re striving for. They never elaborate on what “this” is. They don’t have to. It is no longer ellusive to those of us who know. It is unnameable, unmanageable, unimaginable - this inheritence of it all, but we know. It is both impossible to reach and impossible to avoid. It’s not just pointed feet and straight legs - it is the essence of dance that we are striving for, to tell our story and have it be understood without saying a word.

By the time we realize how much we need our mothers, they have faded from the wings, to the dressing room, to the audience. Ballet has become more of a mother than even the most attentive matriarch, as if even the most sacred bonds can be eclipsed by movement set to music. Our enmeshed, closeted community takes over every facet of our life before we even think to build an identity for ourselves outside of our interests. Interests turn into passions turn into obsessions. It is almost impossible to extricate oneself from the feeling of being a ballerina, even when you’re walking down the street in jeans and sneakers. Dancers are hungry, glutonous creatures with a thirst running so deep for more, more, more that it is almost impossible to quench. We build ourselves with blocks of technique, grace, spontentity, intetionality. Train ourselves to ignore bodily impulses until we can defy gravity and physics and the limits of mortal men. Train ourselves to let go of anything that can’t fit inside a ballet studio’s four walls. Friends, relationships, hobbies don’t exist for us. It is only a barre, floor to ceiling mirrors, and the legacy we can never live up to but feel content to die trying.

As young people, this feels like a special club that we are a select member of. We are so desperate to form an identity that makes us someone that we don’t care what that identity is or how two dimensional it will feel when we look up and realize we missed out on an entire life outside being on stage.

The curse of being young is this: you will always feel time is infinite until you wake up. The curse of being a ballerina is much worse. You will know that your time is limited, but you will remain frozen in amber until it is too late. You will always see death waiting in the wings and keep on dancing anyway. At least, that’s how we feel when we’re seventeen.

For those of us that depart and find there are other ways our bodies can move throughout the world, it will be years before we are able to sleep without waking up with furiously pointed toes. It will be what feels like eons before we get through a night without being plagued with strains of Prokofiev or Tchaikovsky in our dreams. Even when we adjust, we will still dream walk through the world to avoid remembering what it felt like to use our body to make art and love and hurt and life. In the moments when we do remember, when we are forced to awaken and touch those far away places inside ourselves - it will ache. It will rise into our throats as it did the day when walked away, as much as it did the second day we walked away, and the third, and the fourth. Just like our repeated midnight dances, the echoes of what we once were lives in our bones. We craved this, once. The feeling of being alive. 

Now, anytime our bodies force us to remember - it just feels like we’re on fire, burning out from the inside.