STORIES
Ana Chen
Ana Chen
Chinatown Diptych
Jeffrey Liao
In New York’s Chinatown, where the fish outnumber people, I am a foreigner among my own blood. The silver-scaled sea of flailing salmon and ice-packed yellowtail stares at me, a thousand eyes wide and unseeing, hollowed out into corpses. Old women with tongs prod at crabs in wooden crates, their hands calloused like the topography of the Himalayas, knuckles scabbed red like borders wrenched apart. A wishbone beggar coughs black spittle onto white- bricked walls, cigarette smoke thrust from his throat like a page lit on fire. No one notices. My mom and I walk onward to the hazy pulse of the city, our limbs swaying along to this chorus of bodies.
This is the portrait of my Saturday afternoons. While most teenagers spend their weekends relaxing with friends or cramming for tests, I spend mine lost amid crowded market stalls overflowing with Peking ducks and bloodied shark carcasses, the scent of soup dumplings and exotic spices permeating the air. I watch in silence as my mom bargains with a toothless street vendor for a batch of chicken feet, as Mandarin syllables clash in the air like a discordant symphony, a type of music I no longer know how to sing along to.
Growing up, I often felt different from those around me. At home, my tongue was a split nation, bleeding from the warring syntax of dual languages, the rough syllables not quite fitting in my mouth. From age five, I became both child and translator. Under the bruised glow of moonlight, I spent restless nights cradling the phone to my ear while my parents sat helplessly on the couch, assisting them with everything from insurance bills to taxes. Their tongues, knit with the acrid tang of ginseng and tsingtao, did not know how to baptize themselves clean of their homeland. At the grocery store, when middle-aged white women snickered at my mom’s broken English, she stopped speaking at all, knowing that she could not mispronounce silence, that she only belonged through closed teeth.
Yet in the bustling streets of Chinatown, my mom is a fluent speaker. Among the aisles of lychees and moon cakes, steaming baozhi and burning tea leaves, a new language--the language of resilience, of sacrifice, of cultural beauty--bursts to life, and my mom is an expert in its cadences. Here, I observe my mom as she hums along to a Huangmei opera song, as she claps along to dancers in colored silk gowns, as she laughs with a friend while buying a pound of dragon fruit. All around me, people are searching for a semblance of themselves. The market in which I felt like an alien among the harsh and unfamiliar chaos was also where I first found solidarity in my raven-black hair and unfolded eyelids, in the endless crowds of people with gleaming copper skin and oriental-spiced tongues, whose stories reflect my own.
Perhaps this is the distinction between boy and man: to stand in the middle of the seafood aisle, as women with gloved hands and silver knives hack away at the sleek bodies of dying fish, and feel not discomfort in their empty, jaded stares but instead a sense of understanding. To know the tapestry of my identity--woven from red lanterns and firecrackers at sunset, from my parents’ hardened eyes--and smile with pride. I have forgotten the language of my homeland, but I do know the language of the body, of being Chinese-American--the way parents hunch their shoulders inward, weary from carrying the weight of fractured bloodlines, the way children race each other barefoot over dusty roads, the rhythm of their feet against earth its own soaring melody. How the city trembles in the wake of its young. We have sparked an anthem with our voices. All around me, the sonorous din of Mandarin translates to young one - we built this dream for you. Now carry it forward.
Jeffrey Liao
In New York’s Chinatown, where the fish outnumber people, I am a foreigner among my own blood. The silver-scaled sea of flailing salmon and ice-packed yellowtail stares at me, a thousand eyes wide and unseeing, hollowed out into corpses. Old women with tongs prod at crabs in wooden crates, their hands calloused like the topography of the Himalayas, knuckles scabbed red like borders wrenched apart. A wishbone beggar coughs black spittle onto white- bricked walls, cigarette smoke thrust from his throat like a page lit on fire. No one notices. My mom and I walk onward to the hazy pulse of the city, our limbs swaying along to this chorus of bodies.
This is the portrait of my Saturday afternoons. While most teenagers spend their weekends relaxing with friends or cramming for tests, I spend mine lost amid crowded market stalls overflowing with Peking ducks and bloodied shark carcasses, the scent of soup dumplings and exotic spices permeating the air. I watch in silence as my mom bargains with a toothless street vendor for a batch of chicken feet, as Mandarin syllables clash in the air like a discordant symphony, a type of music I no longer know how to sing along to.
Growing up, I often felt different from those around me. At home, my tongue was a split nation, bleeding from the warring syntax of dual languages, the rough syllables not quite fitting in my mouth. From age five, I became both child and translator. Under the bruised glow of moonlight, I spent restless nights cradling the phone to my ear while my parents sat helplessly on the couch, assisting them with everything from insurance bills to taxes. Their tongues, knit with the acrid tang of ginseng and tsingtao, did not know how to baptize themselves clean of their homeland. At the grocery store, when middle-aged white women snickered at my mom’s broken English, she stopped speaking at all, knowing that she could not mispronounce silence, that she only belonged through closed teeth.
Yet in the bustling streets of Chinatown, my mom is a fluent speaker. Among the aisles of lychees and moon cakes, steaming baozhi and burning tea leaves, a new language--the language of resilience, of sacrifice, of cultural beauty--bursts to life, and my mom is an expert in its cadences. Here, I observe my mom as she hums along to a Huangmei opera song, as she claps along to dancers in colored silk gowns, as she laughs with a friend while buying a pound of dragon fruit. All around me, people are searching for a semblance of themselves. The market in which I felt like an alien among the harsh and unfamiliar chaos was also where I first found solidarity in my raven-black hair and unfolded eyelids, in the endless crowds of people with gleaming copper skin and oriental-spiced tongues, whose stories reflect my own.
Perhaps this is the distinction between boy and man: to stand in the middle of the seafood aisle, as women with gloved hands and silver knives hack away at the sleek bodies of dying fish, and feel not discomfort in their empty, jaded stares but instead a sense of understanding. To know the tapestry of my identity--woven from red lanterns and firecrackers at sunset, from my parents’ hardened eyes--and smile with pride. I have forgotten the language of my homeland, but I do know the language of the body, of being Chinese-American--the way parents hunch their shoulders inward, weary from carrying the weight of fractured bloodlines, the way children race each other barefoot over dusty roads, the rhythm of their feet against earth its own soaring melody. How the city trembles in the wake of its young. We have sparked an anthem with our voices. All around me, the sonorous din of Mandarin translates to young one - we built this dream for you. Now carry it forward.
Reverance
Ana Chen
I should look back on my countless hours at the ballet studio.
It was definitely not the best of times, but (unlike my high school experience) the pros outweighed the cons. And I love ballet - it’s addictive precisely because it’s so frustratingly hard.
From my time at the studio, I gained a set of values that define so much of my work: diligence and resilience, openness to corrections and humbleness, self-awareness and sufficiency. There’s also the cons that many of you already know: most significantly, my body image issues, followed by a consumingly individualistic mindset and a near-obsessive approach to all my work. Ballet also made me very idealistic, at times overly so - this was (sort of) knocked back by college apps and some time away from the studio.
I don’t really know where to start this blog: with the very beginning? This is a story I’ve told many times: I started dancing at the Pacific Northwest Ballet School, a Balanchine/American-style academy, but only took ballet seriously when I turned fourteen, two years after I started dancing on pointe.
I was a self-absorbed brat until then. Something snapped into place when my teachers told me to repeat a level (my ankles weren’t strong enough), and I seemingly transformed overnight - I began to stretch outside my classes religiously, to track my calories, to record all the corrections I received after class.
I guess all that work paid off: I was accepted to the Bolshoi Ballet’s Moscow summer intensive in 2016. That summer was wild: homesickness, Russian laundry machines, the notorious stretching classes where I was sure my legs were broken - by the end, I realized how lacking I was in technique.
When I returned to Seattle, I switched studios. Emerald Ballet Theatre was a much smaller school, but the tutelage I received there utterly transformed the way I dance. You can say that PNB taught me discipline, but EBT taught me the art.
“No, Anoutchka,” my Russian teacher would say, smiling at me in affectionate exasperation during our Sunday private lessons. He, his wife, and another teacher (the infamous matriarch of the studio) defined my transition from Balanchine to Vaganova (Russian) style. I had insisted on taking classes with girls several years older than me, spending up to five hours every day at the studio, and he reciprocated my bull-headed stubborness with a deluge of corrections. Every Sunday, following five days of classes, I would spend two hours with him: deconstructing my technique, strengthening and stretching, talking about the art (or about Russia).
He was a gifted teacher - sometimes using objects as oblique as umbrellas and quarters, he taught me how my legs worked; he showed me what flexibility and turn-out truly meant. He had me hold blueberries between my thumb and middle finger (“don’t crush them!”) to alleviate the tension in my hands; he strapped weights onto my ankles and made me stretch my splits between two chairs. In retrospect, all those lessons and lectures feel like a montage out of your stereotypical inspirational sports movie. By the end of one year, I could do thirty-two fouettes (thirty-two more than I could do before) and five pirouettes on pointe; my jumps became much quicker and stronger; I was infinitely more flexible. When I returned to PNB for open classes, I breezed through the combinations at the barre as my former teachers watched in pleasant surprise and an apprehensive suspicion.
The drawbacks of this? A Black Swan-esque obsession. My paranoia around working out and eating strengthened; I became withdrawn during both school and ballet.
And the environment of the studio amplified that. Most of the girls were nice, but I couldn’t find any common ground with them (besides, I’d decided that I was there to dance, not to make friends), but a few went out of their ways to spawn rivalries against me. For the latter half of freshman year and the first half of sophomore year, I found myself entangled in a race to get the most pirouettes, the highest legs, the best jumps.
And while I appreciate competition, this was becoming consuming.
At times, I was so confused - I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to become a professional dancer. I knew I was nowhere near good enough to even dream about that, but there’s something about ballet that resists common sense.
Besides, ballet is incredibly straightforward: you get out what you put in; you are in direct communication with your own body; you know exactly what you need to do and (if you’re lucky) how to do it. Writing, my other extracurricular activity, was frustratingly dependent on my bursts of inspiration and my interactions with other people. When my parents would confront me about my hours at the studio, I would give them - and myself - the same excuse. I’m doing it for college apps.
So I passed my freshman year like that: not quite knowing what I wanted to do with ballet, only knowing that I wanted to do it. Despite the inevitable cattiness of the girls at the studio, despite the frustrations that came with such a demanding art, ballet was a haven from a high school that made me miserable; it seemed as if my entire schedule circulated around the studio.
Then came sophomore year and IB, and things got real. I’ve talked a lot about the stress I had this year, and I don’t think even my junior year/secret college apps could come close to it. Waking up at three-thirty to write, sitting through school (and cramming in as much homework as possible) from seven to three, then dancing from four until nine-thirty or ten...it was no surprise that by the end of June, I veritably collapsed. Unlike last (junior/college app) year, where I possessed a sense of direction and purpose, I was running around like a headless chicken in sophomore year, unable to fathom a way out.
And during all this time, I still had body image issues - I became ashamed of my legs in jeans, of wearing crop tops and bikinis. I gained a lot of weight during IB - I’d lost half my hair and my period during freshman year and eighth grade, but all that came back in the first few months of sophomore year.
So when I went to Stanford during the summer between sophomore and junior year, I was unprepared for the positivity on campus. Here, people were passionate about - but not consumed - by their sports or work. Maybe some weren’t laiden with accolades, like my friends back home, but they were happy. They knew about life; they were good around people; they were smart and capable. Even the students who took ballet classes at Stanford with me - they were PhD candidates in physics and award-winning biology majors. They took ballet seriously, but they weren’t obsessed.
So, tentatively, I began to look beyond the world of school, ballet, and college apps. One Wednesday night, we discussed mental health, and I realized I was far from alone in my issues.
I felt like a new person when I returned to Seattle - stepping back into the studio was jarring as I realized that none of my teachers knew this; none of them knew that from now on, I wouldn’t be taking ballet as seriously, that the technique I’d lost over the summer was not a sign of carelessness, but of a totally new mindset.
And as predicted, my totally new mindset didn’t sit well with my teachers. They couldn’t seem to fathom why the girl who would once arrive an hour early to the studio to stretch (I cut that down to thirty minutes), who would once stay behind after closing hours and on weekends, who would nag them about a correction or to stretch her feet, was suddenly so much more relaxed - and sociable. All the girls at the studio seemed to notice too - I was much more willing to talk with them, much happier in their presence.
Then college apps kicked in. I completed my dance portfolio in October, a hasty recording of Kitri’s Act I variation from Don Quixote. After that, though, my time at the studio dwindled.
“I don’t wanna go to class,” I remember telling Baba one November day as we were driving back from school - I’d been twisting the straps of my dance bag through my hands for a good ten minutes. “I’m too stressed.”
“You sure?” Baba said. “When your mind is stressed, you should exercise - ”
“No,” I said. “I’m gonna stretch at home.”
Fourteen-year-old me would’ve been appalled, I mused, as Baba made a u-turn and drove home. But I just didn’t want to go to ballet: for the first time, the rigor of the art filled me with dread instead of anticipation.
Why? The answer came to me easily - I felt as if I’d outgrown ballet. It was a bubble, a bubble that’d exhausted me socially and (of course) physically. I didn’t want to face my teachers; I didn’t want to face the gossip and the pettiness of some girls.
And I didn’t want to face the mirror - despite everything I’d tried to tell myself over the summer, I was still aware of my body, of the tightness of leotards that’d once fit neatly.
Then came two months of radio silence - I would jump-rope and stretch at home, avoiding EBT like the plague. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to return for the spring semester, after college apps finished; could I call the studio my home if I dreaded returning to it? I’d expected to feel an awful longing when I stopped dancing - instead, I felt relief.
But after college apps finished, I told myself to suck it up and stepped back into the studio.
The first class was surreal. After the initial nervous greetings (my Russian teachers went as;dlkfja;sdlkfj!!!!), I realized how much I’d missed it: the stretching, the five-minute planks, the grueling rond de jambes en l’air, the joy of big jumps and the triumph of completing thirty-two fouettes, the irreplaceable euphoria of going on pointe.
As the months flew by, I realized what I’d been missing in ballet: the pursuit of the art as art. Always in the past, I’d done ballet for something else - for college apps, for petty rivalries, for everyone who said I couldn’t do it, for Instagram, for my teachers. But now, with college apps out of the picture and a newfound peace that came with 2019, I felt happy - truly happy - for the first time in many, many years. I lost weight, but not with the same burning obsession that’d defined me when I was fourteen and fifteen. Perhaps ballet necessitates a slimmer figure for cleaner lines, but it didn’t necessitate all the self-hate I’d put myself through. Even now, I don’t think I have the self-image thing totally figured out, but I can genuinely say that things have gotten better.
And was it just me, or had my time away from the studio made me a better dancer? It wasn’t just all the cross-training that I’d done at home; it was yet another shift in my mindset, something I haven’t quite placed my finger on. I hesitate to call it maturity (what a cliche - and I have so far to go before I can say maturity/life changed the way I dance), but it was some strength of self that I hadn’t possessed previously.
On June 21st, I walked away from the studio for the last time as an EBT student. It was a quiet occasion. I spent a few moments in an empty studio, tracing the ridges in the marley floor as I stretched (oversplits, middle splits, back - the usual cool-down). I gathered up my stuff, took a last look around the dressing room, and stepped outside. There was a private lesson going on behind me, the sun blazing before me.
“Hey,” my dad said, as I approached our car. “You wanna drive?”
“Sure,” I said. I got into the driver’s seat, put on my sunglasses. I hesitated, though; it felt funny that so much of my life had been defined - and will continue to be defined - by these studios. Shouldn’t I be doing something grander to mark what felt like the end of an era?
Come on, Ana, I chided myself. I was just one dancer in the relentless machine of the studio. I would be missed, yes, but everything would go on as normal. I guess that’s another reason why I can’t turn away from ballet: it’s so much greater than the self. Besides, I would come back - whether it be three, six, or nine months later.
So I pulled out of the parking lot, took one look at EBT. The girl inside the studio was performing a reverance, a combination marking the end of the class.
She curtsied, a gesture of respect and appreciation. A curtsy means good-bye; it means see you again.
Above all, it means thank you.
Ana Chen
I should look back on my countless hours at the ballet studio.
It was definitely not the best of times, but (unlike my high school experience) the pros outweighed the cons. And I love ballet - it’s addictive precisely because it’s so frustratingly hard.
From my time at the studio, I gained a set of values that define so much of my work: diligence and resilience, openness to corrections and humbleness, self-awareness and sufficiency. There’s also the cons that many of you already know: most significantly, my body image issues, followed by a consumingly individualistic mindset and a near-obsessive approach to all my work. Ballet also made me very idealistic, at times overly so - this was (sort of) knocked back by college apps and some time away from the studio.
I don’t really know where to start this blog: with the very beginning? This is a story I’ve told many times: I started dancing at the Pacific Northwest Ballet School, a Balanchine/American-style academy, but only took ballet seriously when I turned fourteen, two years after I started dancing on pointe.
I was a self-absorbed brat until then. Something snapped into place when my teachers told me to repeat a level (my ankles weren’t strong enough), and I seemingly transformed overnight - I began to stretch outside my classes religiously, to track my calories, to record all the corrections I received after class.
I guess all that work paid off: I was accepted to the Bolshoi Ballet’s Moscow summer intensive in 2016. That summer was wild: homesickness, Russian laundry machines, the notorious stretching classes where I was sure my legs were broken - by the end, I realized how lacking I was in technique.
When I returned to Seattle, I switched studios. Emerald Ballet Theatre was a much smaller school, but the tutelage I received there utterly transformed the way I dance. You can say that PNB taught me discipline, but EBT taught me the art.
“No, Anoutchka,” my Russian teacher would say, smiling at me in affectionate exasperation during our Sunday private lessons. He, his wife, and another teacher (the infamous matriarch of the studio) defined my transition from Balanchine to Vaganova (Russian) style. I had insisted on taking classes with girls several years older than me, spending up to five hours every day at the studio, and he reciprocated my bull-headed stubborness with a deluge of corrections. Every Sunday, following five days of classes, I would spend two hours with him: deconstructing my technique, strengthening and stretching, talking about the art (or about Russia).
He was a gifted teacher - sometimes using objects as oblique as umbrellas and quarters, he taught me how my legs worked; he showed me what flexibility and turn-out truly meant. He had me hold blueberries between my thumb and middle finger (“don’t crush them!”) to alleviate the tension in my hands; he strapped weights onto my ankles and made me stretch my splits between two chairs. In retrospect, all those lessons and lectures feel like a montage out of your stereotypical inspirational sports movie. By the end of one year, I could do thirty-two fouettes (thirty-two more than I could do before) and five pirouettes on pointe; my jumps became much quicker and stronger; I was infinitely more flexible. When I returned to PNB for open classes, I breezed through the combinations at the barre as my former teachers watched in pleasant surprise and an apprehensive suspicion.
The drawbacks of this? A Black Swan-esque obsession. My paranoia around working out and eating strengthened; I became withdrawn during both school and ballet.
And the environment of the studio amplified that. Most of the girls were nice, but I couldn’t find any common ground with them (besides, I’d decided that I was there to dance, not to make friends), but a few went out of their ways to spawn rivalries against me. For the latter half of freshman year and the first half of sophomore year, I found myself entangled in a race to get the most pirouettes, the highest legs, the best jumps.
And while I appreciate competition, this was becoming consuming.
At times, I was so confused - I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to become a professional dancer. I knew I was nowhere near good enough to even dream about that, but there’s something about ballet that resists common sense.
Besides, ballet is incredibly straightforward: you get out what you put in; you are in direct communication with your own body; you know exactly what you need to do and (if you’re lucky) how to do it. Writing, my other extracurricular activity, was frustratingly dependent on my bursts of inspiration and my interactions with other people. When my parents would confront me about my hours at the studio, I would give them - and myself - the same excuse. I’m doing it for college apps.
So I passed my freshman year like that: not quite knowing what I wanted to do with ballet, only knowing that I wanted to do it. Despite the inevitable cattiness of the girls at the studio, despite the frustrations that came with such a demanding art, ballet was a haven from a high school that made me miserable; it seemed as if my entire schedule circulated around the studio.
Then came sophomore year and IB, and things got real. I’ve talked a lot about the stress I had this year, and I don’t think even my junior year/secret college apps could come close to it. Waking up at three-thirty to write, sitting through school (and cramming in as much homework as possible) from seven to three, then dancing from four until nine-thirty or ten...it was no surprise that by the end of June, I veritably collapsed. Unlike last (junior/college app) year, where I possessed a sense of direction and purpose, I was running around like a headless chicken in sophomore year, unable to fathom a way out.
And during all this time, I still had body image issues - I became ashamed of my legs in jeans, of wearing crop tops and bikinis. I gained a lot of weight during IB - I’d lost half my hair and my period during freshman year and eighth grade, but all that came back in the first few months of sophomore year.
So when I went to Stanford during the summer between sophomore and junior year, I was unprepared for the positivity on campus. Here, people were passionate about - but not consumed - by their sports or work. Maybe some weren’t laiden with accolades, like my friends back home, but they were happy. They knew about life; they were good around people; they were smart and capable. Even the students who took ballet classes at Stanford with me - they were PhD candidates in physics and award-winning biology majors. They took ballet seriously, but they weren’t obsessed.
So, tentatively, I began to look beyond the world of school, ballet, and college apps. One Wednesday night, we discussed mental health, and I realized I was far from alone in my issues.
I felt like a new person when I returned to Seattle - stepping back into the studio was jarring as I realized that none of my teachers knew this; none of them knew that from now on, I wouldn’t be taking ballet as seriously, that the technique I’d lost over the summer was not a sign of carelessness, but of a totally new mindset.
And as predicted, my totally new mindset didn’t sit well with my teachers. They couldn’t seem to fathom why the girl who would once arrive an hour early to the studio to stretch (I cut that down to thirty minutes), who would once stay behind after closing hours and on weekends, who would nag them about a correction or to stretch her feet, was suddenly so much more relaxed - and sociable. All the girls at the studio seemed to notice too - I was much more willing to talk with them, much happier in their presence.
Then college apps kicked in. I completed my dance portfolio in October, a hasty recording of Kitri’s Act I variation from Don Quixote. After that, though, my time at the studio dwindled.
“I don’t wanna go to class,” I remember telling Baba one November day as we were driving back from school - I’d been twisting the straps of my dance bag through my hands for a good ten minutes. “I’m too stressed.”
“You sure?” Baba said. “When your mind is stressed, you should exercise - ”
“No,” I said. “I’m gonna stretch at home.”
Fourteen-year-old me would’ve been appalled, I mused, as Baba made a u-turn and drove home. But I just didn’t want to go to ballet: for the first time, the rigor of the art filled me with dread instead of anticipation.
Why? The answer came to me easily - I felt as if I’d outgrown ballet. It was a bubble, a bubble that’d exhausted me socially and (of course) physically. I didn’t want to face my teachers; I didn’t want to face the gossip and the pettiness of some girls.
And I didn’t want to face the mirror - despite everything I’d tried to tell myself over the summer, I was still aware of my body, of the tightness of leotards that’d once fit neatly.
Then came two months of radio silence - I would jump-rope and stretch at home, avoiding EBT like the plague. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to return for the spring semester, after college apps finished; could I call the studio my home if I dreaded returning to it? I’d expected to feel an awful longing when I stopped dancing - instead, I felt relief.
But after college apps finished, I told myself to suck it up and stepped back into the studio.
The first class was surreal. After the initial nervous greetings (my Russian teachers went as;dlkfja;sdlkfj!!!!), I realized how much I’d missed it: the stretching, the five-minute planks, the grueling rond de jambes en l’air, the joy of big jumps and the triumph of completing thirty-two fouettes, the irreplaceable euphoria of going on pointe.
As the months flew by, I realized what I’d been missing in ballet: the pursuit of the art as art. Always in the past, I’d done ballet for something else - for college apps, for petty rivalries, for everyone who said I couldn’t do it, for Instagram, for my teachers. But now, with college apps out of the picture and a newfound peace that came with 2019, I felt happy - truly happy - for the first time in many, many years. I lost weight, but not with the same burning obsession that’d defined me when I was fourteen and fifteen. Perhaps ballet necessitates a slimmer figure for cleaner lines, but it didn’t necessitate all the self-hate I’d put myself through. Even now, I don’t think I have the self-image thing totally figured out, but I can genuinely say that things have gotten better.
And was it just me, or had my time away from the studio made me a better dancer? It wasn’t just all the cross-training that I’d done at home; it was yet another shift in my mindset, something I haven’t quite placed my finger on. I hesitate to call it maturity (what a cliche - and I have so far to go before I can say maturity/life changed the way I dance), but it was some strength of self that I hadn’t possessed previously.
On June 21st, I walked away from the studio for the last time as an EBT student. It was a quiet occasion. I spent a few moments in an empty studio, tracing the ridges in the marley floor as I stretched (oversplits, middle splits, back - the usual cool-down). I gathered up my stuff, took a last look around the dressing room, and stepped outside. There was a private lesson going on behind me, the sun blazing before me.
“Hey,” my dad said, as I approached our car. “You wanna drive?”
“Sure,” I said. I got into the driver’s seat, put on my sunglasses. I hesitated, though; it felt funny that so much of my life had been defined - and will continue to be defined - by these studios. Shouldn’t I be doing something grander to mark what felt like the end of an era?
Come on, Ana, I chided myself. I was just one dancer in the relentless machine of the studio. I would be missed, yes, but everything would go on as normal. I guess that’s another reason why I can’t turn away from ballet: it’s so much greater than the self. Besides, I would come back - whether it be three, six, or nine months later.
So I pulled out of the parking lot, took one look at EBT. The girl inside the studio was performing a reverance, a combination marking the end of the class.
She curtsied, a gesture of respect and appreciation. A curtsy means good-bye; it means see you again.
Above all, it means thank you.