Kirsten
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Setting The Barre is a chronicle of my adventures as a professional ballet dancer, amateur poet, voracious traveller, and avid tea drinker.
Walking through the streets nameless, meeting baristas who do not know your usual, window shopping strange storefronts. Camp and Matisse, ocean eyes and a polka dotted dress, fig gelato and getting caught in the rain. I came home minus my old phone, but plus a new little gold loop on my finger. Stacked with my precious “amis” ring, my left hand is singing a whole new song, and I’m into it.
Feeling so excited to have such a powerful role model coming our way, and a wonderful, welcomed addition to the FBP family, of course. There are parts of yourself that you can’t find reflected in the bubbled bottom of a bottle of wine, or the ice chips squeezing final sips of diluted gin. Don’t look for these bits of you in the mirror- not even a peculiar room with entirely mirrored walls and amber shells- your questions will be as if unheard. In unrelenting laughter that rolls from your belly and bursts from your lips, in words never spoken but exchanged through subtle movements in brows, in tears caught before they leave your cheeks.
I don’t know yet what I don’t know, but I do know this: Everyone ever will always surprise you eventually. I’ve spent the past 4 years contemplating the existence of a higher power, but regardless of this inconclusive search, it seems that each life is composed of a series of decisions. Whether these decisions lead to actions that “happen for a reason” or are completely random becomes irrelevant to this conversation, because it does not change the sole thesis that: Everyone ever will always surprise you eventually. A person we think we know sets off a surprise chain with some “uncharacteristic” behavior and our reaction, our series of decisions in the cold, unrelenting wake of this surprise, can set a self-surprise into motion.
The anguishing betrayal was not just a dormant memory in my own life’s experience. Odile’s slippery charm- while not exactly inherent- never felt altogether foreign, as if this persona was one I’ve tried on before. I have waxed on about ballet life matching up with real life time and time again. I shouldn’t be surprised when this happens, but every time I find myself in awe of this art form’s ability to sink its teeth into my life and reveal bits of me that I didn’t know existed.