Loose Woman

Ballet is a foreign galaxy the first day. Everything is wildly unfamiliar—the sharp odor of sweat on metal as clammy hands grip the barre, the buttery resistance of Marley floors beneath scuffing feet. Your ballet slippers are far from pretty, at least up close. They are the color of nausea, scrunched up with too-tight elastic, and the suede soles feel misplaced. You point, you flex, you wobble on tip-toe. These are not your feet.

The first exercise, the plié, sounds like a joke: Bend your knees, straighten, repeat. If this is ballet, you’ll be dancing Swan Lake in no time, floating across the stage in your tutu and natural bendy-kneed ability. But of course it’s not that easy. Your dance teacher is suddenly a drill sergeant, and you are smacking straight into the many hurdles of gracefulness. Shoulders back. Hips tucked. Chin high. Spine stretched. Head tilted. Arms curved. Neck straight. Legs turned out. Stomach pulled in. Breathe small, straight up and down, up and down. Never let your diaphragm move. Tighten, tighten, tighten, tighten, tighten.

At first, you feel claustrophobic inside your own muscles as they contort into new positions. Your brain is locked in a grimace, trying to convert unfamiliar French terms into movement into some semblance of beauty, and you feel exactly like a duck. But after awhile (maybe months, probably years), your body adapts. Your feet expect the pressure of elastic and blister tape. Your rib cage compresses obediently, your head tilts the right direction by instinct. You turn out, tuck under, stretch up, suck in, and learn how to survive on stringent tastes of air.

—

When I was ten years old, I placed second in a mile-long running race against thirteen-year-olds. I ran in my Keds (remember those?) and was hardly winded at the end. When I was thirteen, I participated in the same race again—this time with running shoes and a title to uphold—but gave up halfway through. The stitch in my side was so bad that it took me a good thirty minutes to limp back. When I was fifteen, I quit ballet after realizing I didn’t want to do pas de bourrées for the rest of my life, but my body was already trained to be a tight, leggy ribbon, and so it has stayed.

Two years ago, after weeks of lunchtime workouts, I was able to complete five minutes on the elliptical machine. I had worked hard to make it that far, but I couldn’t celebrate. I just looked around at the college girls in their hot pink sweat pants, their round butts emblazoned with “sexy” and “angel” in glitter, breezing through their second hour of aerobics. Why was I such a wimp after years of intense physical training? Needleholes of painful light pricked against my eyelids, my forehead burned, and I resigned to becoming a couch potato forever.

—

I’ve moved far away from the galaxy of ballerinas. Their lipsticked self-control, their masquerade of effortless grace no longer apply to me. But as I’ve moved farther down the path of joy and spontaneity and chocolate cake and yoga, I’ve started realizing how starved I am for breath. All these years, I’ve been sucking in my stomach instead of air. I’ve lost my ability to run; I don’t know how to relax.

So I’m relearning how to breathe these days. I rest my hand on my diaphragm and will it to move, to draw in air instead of blocking it out. I relax my way through the sputtering of unused muscles, the pain of fresh oxygen in dusty passages of my lungs. I loosen and loosen and loosen and loosen, and my gray barnacled control begins to chip away. I want to run again, and I think, If I can be a real, live person who can love, adapt, and dream in Technicolor without air, just think what this life will be once I learn how to breathe…

Just think!