She had never dreamed it would be so luminous, so gentle. She was floating, flying, rising on musical notes. The most beautiful soft music she'd ever heard. It persuaded her to dance, to move her body and glide along clouds, turning on currents of air. She smiled. She still had it. She laughed and her laughter joined the music falling around her, becoming part of the orchestra. Nothing could take that away from her.

She always thought that death would be more shocking to her system. Not that she spent much of her life thinking about it, but she always figured she'd feel a wrenching away, a dramatic parting with her body and the world. But this was so soft, like being carried to bed by a lover. She thought she'd see only darkness, be lost in unfamiliar places, but it was so bright, lit by thousands of candles, and she could see things that were never there before. Spaces between the worlds she thought as she rose. Turning and turning she drifted above the world for what seemed like hours, days. Finally she turned her face to the earth and saw the panic, saw the glass, and her tears started to fall making rain on the twisted metal, on the bent concerned faces of strangers, on the blaring red and blue lights spinning, washing away the blood, all the blood, and the pain.

She continued to rise, faster, her limbs becoming tense, fighting with the currents. Stop! Where am I going? She struggled with the wind, pushed at the clouds. The music stopped. She heard whispers. The air grew tighter around her, the rain fell harder as she cried and cried. Out of the whispers a voice became clear.

‘Let go. Let it all go.’

 So familiar this voice.

‘That's it doll, come on. Atta girl, let go.’

 She felt her body relax, give itself up to the air and his voice. The music began again and the wind coaxed her limbs and moved them in a dance for her. She felt weak but she allowed herself to be led, letting the old euphoria return, letting the earth fade out.

‘Someone will take care of all that,’ she heard the voice say before she lost consciousness.

****

When she woke there was still music, but it was different. Someone played the piano. The notes fell strong and uneven like jagged bits of glass, but she couldn't see the player. The room was warm and filled with light. There was wood under her back, sticky, sandy, supporting her weight. And the smell. The smell was so familiar. It hinted at stale sweat and old shoes. She moved her head, assembled her legs underneath herself slowly. There was something wrong with her vision- the edges were blurry like she had forgotten to put her contact lenses in that morning. But then she remembered she had. She sat up carefully, her head filled with cotton, her legs like a child’s in stilletoes. She could make out a figure casually leaning against the piano.

"I have been vatching you."

It was a man's voice. Thick Russian accent. Commanding.

Her vision was slowly coming back. She could see the mirrors, the wooden barres, and the perfectly black pleated pants of the man looking at her.

"I'm in a ballet studio."

"Ov courze, dear. Vhere else vould you go?"

She rose, took a few shaky steps toward the man, seeing the thick black glasses of the piano player who was still playing as if no one else were there, seeing the thin nose of the man in the black pants, his slender legs, graceful fingers.

"Mr. Balanchine."

"Yez dear." He smiled at her.

 Standing before her was a legend, an idol- one of her very few idols. And she was so spacey, so disconnected. So she just stared at him, not believing that this could be real.

"Well, I thought we could get started right away, but I think no. I think you are tired. You need rest. We can start later. Tomorrow. Time is nothing here."

"Start what? What am I doing here?"

"I have been vatching you. Ever since that summer at ballet camp in Vermont. Remember it? Madame Svetlova- tiny little fireball! She was somezing in her day! Yez, you remember. I saw you there; I noticed your pain vhen no one else did."

"I don't- I don't understand.”

“You are tired. Exhausted from falling upwards. Tomorrow. Tomorrow we work.”

With that he turned, beckoned the piano player to follow, and together they departed quietly through a door at the end of the studio. She was left alone. In a ballet studio. All alone.

Suddenly she heard that same music again. It was music that sounded like laughter. She looked in the mirror. Same petite body. Same short hair. She pointed her foot. Something was different. Somehow the arch was higher than it was before, so much higher and gorgeous. This couldn’t be. She pointed her other foot- same thing. She lifted her leg in arabesque, expecting it to stop at its usual ninety-degree height, but it floated up and up, a perfect arc from her back. The music grew louder, morphed into a waltz. She loved the waltz with its comforting, rolling tempo and luxurious rhythm. She began to move, a simple dance across the floor, moving across the room like wind. That is what a good waltz feels like, she thought, I entered heaven like the wind.

The music and the movement got inside her, edging out any disbelief, any questions, as it always did. Suddenly she could float better, soar better, her movements more precise and fluid than ever before. She prepared for a pirouette, always a struggle, and just like wind moving through trees, effortless, she floated around in 3 perfect circles, catching the downbeat as she continued her waltz across the studio. She smiled. Then giggled. Soon it was outright laughter. She was free. Finally free!

****

When she was seventeen, already the age of a pre-professional ballerina, she went to ballet camp. The bug had bit her somehow after missing her all those  years since she was three years old at her first ballet lesson. As an adolescent, dance was of no more interest to her than the horseback riding, acting, and art classes she was already taking. Her mother read her a book once, about a little girl who took ballet lessons every day after school for hours, but she just found it sad. Over the hill at seventeen, she didn’t know how or why, but she had to dance, and she had to learn fast. That summer was both delightful and devastating, bearer of knowledge necessary and painful.  As she warmed up at the barre the next morning, she remembered the blazing July sun in the mountains, the buzz in the amphitheatre as the audience waited for the curtain to rise, the faint breeze shifting her long brown hair around her eyes, eyes ready to devour everything she saw. She remembered the curtain going up, the dancers costumed in rich jeweled-hues- scarlet, emerald, gold- alive and in harmony with the backdrop of the mountains in summer. There was beauty and power coming from that stage. She felt something vulnerable in her throat, and suddenly the breeze seemed too warm, the air too close. Her new friends surrounding her, their knees pressed so close to her own, felt confining, choking, and invasive. So she ran. She bolted for the open fields of the Arts Center, stumbled into spaces where no one would notice her tears. To want something so fiercely that you could taste it yet never quite touch it, a dream wafting slowly into a nightmare to tease you for all of your life, has to be the most awful feeling there is, she thought. It must be like Hell.

“Ah, but Heaven is just the opposite dear. Heaven is for dreamers.”

Mr. Balanchine walked over to the piano. His pants were once again perfectly pleated, his stride majestic. The man in the thick glasses sat down at the keys.

“Igor, today ve start. You look well dear.” He said turning to her at the barre. “Ve start with my Violin Concerto.”

His body came alive as he showed her the opening movements. Passion ignited his aquiline fingers as they carved the air. The lilting music echoed inside her as she began to master the classical steps- one more part in the lineage of a legacy.

“Yez dear! Remember, it is how you feel about what you are doing that is important!”

Balanchine coached her as the dance took its shape on her body. With each phrase of movement memorized, her dream began to take shape as well.

“No dear. You cannot think in the air- land soft plie, small second, gather your thoughts.”

She was dancing, really dancing like she’d never danced before. She was impassioned, exhilarated, empowered and happier than she’d ever been.

“This is a place for gifts, dear. A place for happiness. A place where you can finally stop chasing. We have show next week. You will dance this Concerto. We rehearse every day at 10.”

 

Wanting can drive you out of yourself. It can torment you until you achieve greatness, or haunt you while you stand by and do nothing. In this place, all the torment and driving launched her to her destiny, to the final resting place of her soul. She felt a soft parting of air, and her will met with the will of the heavens, and she was dancing.

The footlights were hot and white. The curtain was red and heavy and the expanse of black before her speckled with faces. The orchestra began like voices of angels and she was alive again. Arcing her pirouettes like a song from her heart, she moved out onto the stage a ballerina. Beaming on her from just beyond the proscenium were eyes shining like aquamarines.

A whisper in her ear. Atta Girl Suz. Beautiful, doll.

Grandpa, she thought as she flew across the stage, I’ve come home.