"In My Life"

My tights itched. Baggy in the ankles yet tight and scratching away at my shins, I was silently kicking myself for shaving my legs the day prior. I was 12 years old and the concept of shaving was exotic at the time, but more than anything I just wanted to feel special for my final recital. And so the night before it, I quickly grabbed my newly purchased, bubblegum pink Schick razor with overconfident zeal, and without having a clue as to what I was doing, hopped into the shower and scraped the razor up my skin for the first time, creating what would soon resemble winding and hairless country roads with the occasional nicked pothole. I covered these bumps with Ninja Turtle band-aids (they were the only ones I could find in my house) but was paranoid that Leonardo would be visible from the stage. I wondered if this painful self-awareness was just another part of growing up.

My thoughts left the annoyance below my knees and returned to the girl standing before a lighted mirror of the dressing room. Staring back at me was a girl who was growing out her bangs that she had since she began to grow hair at the ripe age of 3, and was wearing her mother's red lipstick and blush. I didn't recognize her, but I knew she was me. A few minutes earlier, I had taken my mother's eyeliner in secret and dotted a mole above my upper lip so I would look like Cindy Crawford. And then carefully, I adjusted the bobby pins in my bun and sprayed extra-hold hairspray in my now darkening hair. I smoothed my green, velvety leotard and poofed the pale white tulle of my tutu. I looked into the mirror, and despite my turtle avenger band-aids, I didn't feel like a child anymore.

While admiring my costume, I saw other girls in the dressing room preparing for their own performances. These girls were much younger than me, and their mothers were helping to apply their stage makeup while the girls sat cross-legged, picking the sequins off of their skirts. I recalled with ease the moment in my early childhood when I was to dance to "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in a recital. We were all very excited, for the teacher told us that we could choose the costume color that each of us wanted. I, being quiet and small, was pushed behind in line by the other, taller girls and therefore had the last choice in color preference. So naturally when all of the other girls got pretty tutus in shades of pink, red, and violet, I was stuck with lime green. I laughed to myself, remembering the pictures that were taken of me that evening. On stage and on film, I resembled a dehydrated pea in a galaxy of twinkling stars, and in some of the snapshots you could see me clutching my glittering wand for dear life, holding back childish tears. But I still performed the ballet. Later, as I went into the auditorium feeling lost and ugly, my mother and father ran toward me, arms open and full of calla lilies. They were my favorite flowers. I fell into their arms, crying and saying I felt like an ugly vegetable. They said I looked like a star.

Those memories slowly faded to black, and I fixed my gaze away from the little girls and back to the mirror, imagining how I would look on stage in the coming moments. The theme of this year's recital was portraits, and the hope was that the choreography and music would emulate a famous work of art. My class' piece was "The Yellow House" by Vincent Van Gogh. Miss Jody, my teacher, selected "In My Life" by the Beatles for our music, but the version that we would dance to was done by Judy Collins. At the time, I chided Miss Jody for her choice, saying that the song was silly and no fun to dance to. Arms crossed in her oversized black ballet sweater, she would laugh and shake her head, telling me that one day I would understand it. I didn't at the time, but still learned the choreography to the best of my ability.

I hoped tonight would be special, as this was going to be my last performance on the stage where I had been performing for nearly 6 years. At home, my room was little more than stacked, labeled boxes and floral suitcases. In my head, there was little more than a few final goodbyes filled with words and thoughts that I had yet to explore and say to a few special people. I would be leaving in three days, never to return to my sleepy beach home again. I was trading sand for bluegrass, and with that trade came the loss of a father's presence, friends, and a childhood. Miss Jody had given me the final 16 counts for a solo, and I needed them to be perfect. Everything else in my life was in flux and fading away, but I was in complete control of my own two feet. I imagined myself dancing and turning and leaping across the stage, the audience fixated on the lone ballerina.

All of a sudden, my dreams quickly dissipated as girls in familiar green and white costumes caught my eye. Our piece was next. Reluctantly, I crunched my faded pink ballet shoes into the box of rosin, praying for a good grip. I breathed deeply, and then stepped to the sides of the stage.

I watched in awe as the current group performed grand jeté after grand jeté in light blue and white leotards. Their piece was a beach scene painted by Joaquin Sorolla. The entirety of their choreography was very advanced: all of their footwork was done en pointe. These girls were older, most likely with smooth legs and beauty marks above their upper lips, and I wondered to myself if someday I would ever have younger girls look at me the way I was at them. I could only hope so. I thought they were so beautiful. The music came to a quiet close, and the older girls ended in perfect splits and arabesques. Shrinking into myself, I was beginning to feel like a pea once more.

At that moment, I felt a warm hand on my shoulder. I looked up, and there stood Miss Jody, smiling. "You're going to do something special for this silly song still; right, Savannah?"

I laughed skittishly, but for whatever reason, I wanted to cry. She put a thin hand on each of my cheeks and looked me in the eyes, holding my gaze. I felt like she knew everything. And then, she took one of her fingers to her mouth and licked its tip. Then, she reached with her wet fingertip and placed it atop my upper lip, wiping away my artificial beauty mark. "Did you have an accident with the eyeliner or something?" she asked, grinning.

I didn't answer.

The curtain began to close and the older girls passed me. Miss Jody kissed my forehead and squeezed my hands. "Just get out there and dance, Savannah," she said, "I know you can." She released my hands from her grasp, and then disappeared into the darkness.

And so, with apprehension leading each of my footsteps, I entered the stage. Even with five toes on the ground, the weight of my body on the balls of my feet, and with eyes extending slightly above the horizon line like we had learned in class, I still felt as if I were a ship that would capsize at any moment. I extended my arms to second position and breathed a shaky breath as the curtains rose for the final time. I looked to the crowd and saw them: the people I would be leaving, the people I would be seeing, the people I did not know and never would, and all the while thinking about the people and places I had yet to meet. I was overwhelmed, panic stricken, and contemplating running off the stage when suddenly the music began. The soft and gentle guitar eased into the hall and silenced all of my thoughts. It was time to stop worrying and to start dancing.

And so I did; we all did. Our movements were slow and simple, yet graceful all the same. With each breath, each tondu and coupé, my thoughts moved further and further away from my mind, losing themselves in the corners of my body's long and lean shadows. My movements were smooth and controlled, as if I were a small, silk ribbon being unwound from a narrow spool.

The final 16 measures approached, and the other girls in my class began to walk demi-pointe off the stage. My only remaining partner was a dim spotlight that followed me wherever I went. Judy Collins' voice guided me as I marked my final steps on the stage:

But all of these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new

Coupé, chassé, soutenu. Only a few more steps remained.

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life, I love you more

Tour jeté, pas de bourrée, and a final pirouette. I did a double.

In my life, I love you more

I landed the turn, feeling firm in my feet with my head lifted up toward the balcony. I scanned it and saw my mother and father, and then my grandmother and grandfather. They all began to clap before the song had even ended. My mother was wiping tears from her eyes; my father was holding calla lilies. The audience began to applaud, too, and the other girls in my class returned to the stage, joining me and holding my hands. We bowed, and the red curtain began to fall from the ceiling. As I was running off stage, I saw Miss Jody emerge from the sides, arms naturally resting in a low first position. She mouthed the words "thank you" to me, and then disappeared once again behind the curtain.

After the recital was over, I ran to my family, throwing myself into the faces I would be seeing and the faces I would be leaving; past, present, nor future was forcing me to rest more heavily on one person in particular. I was steady on my own two feet. As the five of us were leaving the recital hall and heading to the car, I stopped abruptly and began scratching at the band-aids that hid impatiently beneath my tights.

"What's wrong?" my mother asked me.

"Oh, nothing," I sighed, "I just cut myself shaving last night."

My mother looked to my father and smiled. "Billy," she said, "it looks like our little girl is growing up."

hands

"In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary."

 -Sherwood Anderson, "Hands" 

Most of my youth has been spent behind some kind of wheel. However, I was rarely the driver. The woman responsible for my motion throughout the majority of those years was my mother, who took me to and from copious amounts of practices: ballet, soccer, violin lessons…all without a complaint. On the majority of these drives, when I wasn’t playing with whatever plush toy I had sitting in my lap and when I wasn’t drawing flowers in the fog on the windows as it rained, I focused my eyes tightly on my mother’s hands and how firmly they grasped the steering wheel.

I was always fascinated with them, and how with the slightest inch given either way, we would result in a different place. In my 9-year-old mind, I found it incredible that she knew all of the routes, roads, and expressways in our sleepy beach town. How did she know her way around? How did she realize, perhaps instinctively, that exit 23A would lead you to the lagoon, but exit 23B would lead you straight to a landfill?

Back then, I viewed all roadways as nothing more than slick, concrete spider webs. People would slide up and down them, left and right, all spiders sharing the same home. But then, a collision would occur, completely at random, and then and only then would one realize if they were the predator or the prey, or worse: neither. Just a sad spider stuck in a web that will never untangle. Stuck, having to see the other spiders roam about, up and down and left and right. How terrible it would be to have all of those limbs but all of those limits.

I decided then, riding in the car on the way to soccer practice, that I didn’t ever want to run that risk. I didn’t want to get stuck in a tangle of my own creation just because I wanted to move. I didn’t trust myself. I looked to my mother’s hands, so firm and resolute on the wheel, her eyes occasionally checking the rearview mirror. I admired my own hands: small, pale pink, nails bitten with a few remaining specks of old teal nail polish. They were nothing like my mother’s. I lacked the mole on my right ring finger, the deep nail beds, the slight chip on my left index finger, and the confidence in my palms. Her hands held tightly to the wheel, but there was a small space between her C-shaped grip and it. My mother knew where she was going; everything was OK. I looked down to my own hands in disappointment. Quickly, discreetly, I tucked them under my thighs and sat in silence until I reached the soccer fields, watching with intense awe at the slow and purposeful rotations my mother made with her hands as she drove.

Years passed, and my fear and disappointment of my own hands naturally grew. I had interests, hobbies, favorite things and the like, but even when my hands were not in tight little fists or tucked beneath my legs (I preferred them here because after a while I could not feel them anymore) I still kept my eyes away from them, fearful of having to see my own fears and doubts, of my potentials and my limits. I never wore rings or bracelets. My nails were always short and swollen from the biting and picking, and suffice it to say I never painted them.  I figured that as long as I was able to forget my hands, I would be able to avoid making choices: left or right, up or down.

For years, I buried my hands in my pockets. And for years, I hid my head in the sand like an ostrich does, viewing my fears and doubts of myself as abnormally large and flightless wings. And because of this limited vision in sight and scope, I spent the majority of high school as a buoy, floating listlessly and aimlessly as others passed me in the waters. I never sank, but I never really went anywhere, either. I was just a mark. I entered college with much of the same disposition, occasionally being pushed forward by the effects of another’s wake, but soon enough returning to rest. I knew what I needed to do to complete the next task, to stay afloat, but beyond that, not much mattered. Where was I going? I didn’t know. Where did I want to go? I didn’t know that, either. But I was fine with that. I never wanted to know.

However heavy and paralyzed I felt during this time, my petrified self had begun to move up and down and left and right at much more impressive rates. My family was driven to teach me the ways of the world and to make me feel at home in any of its many nooks. And so I traveled many places with them: from the shores of Normandy to the pyramids of Chichen Itza to the colossal mountains of the Pacific Coast. I was extremely grateful for all of these opportunities to travel, and I was fine with all of this movement because I was with family. I followed them with my heavy-lidded eyes, I watched as they made their steps up and down the ancient ruins, as they navigated the steering wheel left and right on the scenic highways of Big Sur.

When I was at the wheel of my own car (as reluctant as I was to begin driving a car of my own), my fears of collisions turned into fantasies as I allowed my mind to wander to the place where one keeps questions of “What if?” More specifically, questions like “What if I drove into the next pair of headlights I see? What would happen then? What if?” While I never took these questions too seriously, I would often imagine what I would look like in my hospital gown, and who would come to visit my bed. Sometimes, I would wonder who would bring flowers and if I would warm to hospital food. But the part of these questions I lingered on the most was what it would feel like on the impact. I wondered what it would feel like to be thrust from my car and into oncoming traffic, to be weightless and free, to no longer be a buoy but rather a bird, even if it only meant returning to reality a few moments later, and then to feel nothing once again. Forever.You know, the moment when you can feel darkness creeping slowly into your cellular membranes, and one by one yet all at once, all the living cells in your body vanish like flames on birthday candles. I've always wondered what that feels like. I've always wondered what it feels like to die.

However high my morbid imagination would take flight, there were other questions that aided in their eventual descent. One day, while driving and imagining what kind of scrubs I would like the nurse in my room to don, I gripped the wheel so tightly that I could see the whites of my knuckles staring back at me like ghosts. My hands began to ache. Shaking my head, I looked back to the road in front of me, laughing nervously at the next car I saw pass me in the other lane. Silly girl.

During that time, my thoughts finally drifted down from what could be to what was, they fell from visions to memories. I recalled with ease the afternoon I spent gazing in awe at the city of Paris after climbing to the top of the Sacre Coeur, the electric flush on my face after whispering the words “I love you” into the ears of another for the first time, and the steadiness of my mother’s hands on the steering wheel while we drove on a steep, narrow road up the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia. Up, up, up, we went, and so did the memories in number. I began to wonder, then, what future memories I would miss if along with my imagination's flight, I took my body. That question, to me, was much more disturbing than any other questions I could have ever asked myself. And sure enough, I decided I had had enough driving that way.  Looking to my hands, then throbbing and white, I cut my trip short and drove home.

That evening, I walked to a nearby elementary school playground. I sat on a bench and watched the sunset, occasionally drawing flowers in my notebook. This was the same playground where my grandfather re-learned to walk at age 72, after spending months in a hospital bed. I recalled how difficult it was for him to move and how often he had to stop to sit on a bench. The goal was never anything major: make it from the monkey bars to the swing set at the end of the lot. His pace was erratic: some days he would walk to the swings, and other days, when little children would go flying past him playing tag, he would lower his head in resignation, saying that he was short of breath and needed to rest and wanted to go home. I would always sit with him while he rested, never speaking or questioning his reasoning. I just stopped and listened to him breathe. Eventually, I would stand and extend my hand to his. He would laugh and then stand, too. And then together we would walk slowly to the end of the playground, sometimes stopping, sometimes going.

This was also the same place where I practiced parallel parking. My mother used two of our floral lawn chairs as markers. Some nights, I would spend close to an hour perfecting the art of a parallel park. And other nights, I would grow frustrated quickly and give up, embarrassed and wanting to hide my face from the older teenagers that were smoking cigarettes on the swings. I would throw my hands in the air in disgust, stopping the car and pulling up the emergency brake. And mother would stop, too, and let me breathe. And then we would try again. Sometimes stopping, sometimes going.

This evening, there were no screaming children and there were no jaded teenagers. I watched as the wind would occasionally make one of the swings move forward slightly and then back in place. I watched as the sun’s rays caused changes in the shadows of the fence, moving left to right. I looked to the monkey bars, remembering the day my grandfather was able to make it from the slide all the way over there on his own. I remembered the bright reflection of his teeth as I caught him smiling on the drive back home. I looked to the parking lot and remembered the day I took my driver’s test on my own, passing the parallel parking section without the floral lawn chairs. I was so happy that day. All of a sudden, my hands began to ache.

I removed them from under my legs and looked to them: to my knuckles, to my thin fingers and joints, to my short nails. I put one hand in the other and felt their weight. I had forgotten how calloused and strong my fingertips had become from playing the cello and violin. I stared at them intently, pondering what they could do and where they could take me. I remembered my grandfather walking step by step, trudging like a 6’”2 baby, sometimes stopping, sometimes going. I remembered him taking my hand. And so, hand clasped in my own, I stood. Arms swinging at my sides, I walked toward the sunset.

Where am I going? I don’t know. Where do I want to go? I don’t know that, either. But I’m fine with that. I never want to know. With a head out of the sand and a heart in my hands, I am in motion. Sometimes stopping, sometimes going.

passive agressive poison

I have always had lingering suspicions, questions, fears, worries, and apprehensions nestled quietly in the back of my head. But now, more than ever, their purring has grown louder and louder to the point of a collective, snake-like hiss and I wonder how I was able to deal with such poison for so long.

To expel venom from a snake, you generally have to milk the snake by bringing its fangs to a latex lid on the fore of a vial. This angle of the snake's mouth activates and puts pressure on the venom glands, and then, drop by drop, tiny globules of milky poison (they look like pearls!) are extracted from the creature. While this extraction is both vital and beneficial, there are two lingering problems (at least in my mind):

1. The snake, venomous or not, still looks the same
2. There remains a certain doubt, regardless of assurances of its safety, that the snake will always be poisonous, so much so that other creatures will cower in fear from something that may be innocent; or conversely, the weak and vulnerable may quiver in silence, feeding only the insatiable ego of the toxic reptile.

Moreover, it is important to consider the curious position of the snake in the process of milking. While it releases potentially deadly toxins and certain agents into the vial, it is also providing the necessary ingredients for antivenin, an antitoxin that is essentially used to save others from the fatal effects of itself. Additionally, when the snake expels its venom, it does so for all to see. The glass is clear, and the milker realizes how vile this seemingly sleek and shiny creature really is.

It must take courage to expel the vile in your own vial.
If I were a snake, I don't know if I would be able to do it.
But then again, a snake never chooses to expose its toxicity.
It remains hidden, beneath its smooth scales and marble eyes
only revealing itself to its unfortunate victim
as she hears its slithering body coming closer.
It hisses louder
It rattles its tail
and then attacks
sinking its fangs deeper and deeper into her skin.

Soon after, the victim usually begins to bruise and sweat. And then sometimes, depending on the severity of the toxins, he or she may become paralyzed, completely consumed by the bite. And while the victim lay coiled and catatonic on the ground, spewing milky saliva into a pathetic little pool by their chin, one may consider how similar the snake and its victim are to one another now. The more intellectually ambitious individual may question who the victim really is, anyway. The girl was warned, after all.

I lay in my bed right now, motionless. My eyes are reflecting these words, my mind is pulsating, and I am hurt. But I must wonder: am I the snake, or am I the victim? And even if I am one of those, how would I be able to tell the difference?

I may choose to open my mouth and see what comes out.  There are numerous benefits, after all.
Truth, a remedy, certainty, etc.
But that requires the courage to accept that I could expel just spit
or worse: venom.
And that I must shatter my hope that I have just been bitten and do not bite.
Well, my only vial is tinted.
And I can't open my mouth yet, because
even when I have begun to speak and to expel my poison and my doubts, I hear hisses of
"Oh, just get over it.
That doesn't even matter.
It's irrelevant."

Well, I don't trust a moving mouth anymore, not even my own,
not even from a friend.
Friends and foes both have flesh.
And I've come to the realization lately that
all teeth are toxic, milked or not.

(Additionally, I wish that I am not taken for a fool. That is the most insulting thing of all.)