The Dancing Girl

This morning I danced again.

For the first time in a year, I let my feet carry me across the pavement. I tilted my head towards the sun, letting the warmth breathe life back into my body and I spun, twisted, and turned—my feet and arms seeming to make movements of their own accord. The feeling felt so familiar, like coming home after being away for a long time. I leapt towards the sky, my body moving in time with the wind. After months of letting the harshness of the world drown me in such sorrow and despair, dancing on this pavement felt like coming up for air.

For the first time in months, I felt alive again. The exhaustion and the soreness that followed thereafter were worth it. Because this morning, I was a dancing girl again. An innocent, who knew not of the harsh reality of the real world that awaited her.

But now, as night falls and the glass shatters, I make my way to my usual corner of the city. It generally stays shrouded in darkness and shadow, even in broad daylight, but it sees enough traffic and passersby and that makes it the best place in the city to beg for money.

As I walk, a tiny, minuscule memory flashes at the edges of my mind as I position a cigarette between my lips. The images are distorted, fleeting. A dark-haired, little girl, no more than ten, dances in front of a mirror in her small bedroom, smiling in a way that breaks apart her entire face. Nothing lies behind that smile. No pain, no sadness, no hardness of a woman who has seen the worst that the world has to offer.

I try so fiercely to cling to the memory of the little girl—me—dancing unapologetically, spinning wildly and grinning heartily. I cling to it like a candle clings to the last flickers of a waning flame.

But like everything eventually does, the memory dies.

No matter how hard I persist against the darkness, trying in vain to hold onto memories of a time when I felt true and unadulterated happiness, it always comes crashing back down over me, reminding me time and time again that there is no way out. The darkness, ever an infinite and lonely void, is now my home.

A violent wind brushes against my arms, spreading goosebumps against my flesh. I scrub my hands vehemently up and down the length of my shoulders, down to my hands, struggling to create warmth.

The cigarette drops from my lips as my attention is diverted away from it, and instead on the blistering cold night. I watch it roll away from me and across the concrete. As I move to retrieve it, I notice a small slip of paper. I ignore the cigarette and bend to pick up the paper and find that it is not just a mindless slip of paper at all.

It’s a check.

A check for $20,000.

It is made payable to cash, and in the memo line, it reads: For the dancing girl.

A gasp wrenches itself from me suddenly and I am robbed of breath, of discernible thought, of any sense whatsoever.

I crush the check in my fists as tears begin to violently stream down my cheeks because not only has someone borne witness to my vulnerability, a moment where I decided against my better judgment to let my guard down, they’ve turned it into some vile joke. Now, what only moments ago was a spark of hope for me has been diminished and only serves as a reminder of how cruel the world can be.

I slide against the wall and I watch as the hustle and bustle of the city winds down. Not a single person takes a second glance at me or my pathetic change jar.

I glance down at the check as another tear slips down my cheek and onto it. The remitter line reads: William Perry. A name that in the deepest recesses of my mind rings a sliver of familiarity. Given that, I allow myself to wish for just one singular moment that it was real. That it was even possible. That in my cold, blistering hands, I now held the power to change my fate. That my life could be in my own hands. That I no longer had to console myself to being at the mercy of strangers and beg for mere scraps. That I could have the things I so desperately crave. Money. Food. A warm bed. A shower. Light. To dance in a mirror, unburdened and unbeaten, to the beat of the happiness exploding like fireworks in my chest.

I let the thought drift away as I can no longer suffer it’s impossibility. I press the palms of my hands to my eyes and bury my face in my knees, hoping and praying and wishing and yearning that the night would near its end. The nights are the worst, not only because of the cold, but because of the quiet. No companionship save for my own thoughts. The end of the night, at the very least, was something to look forward to. If I cannot have food, then I will settle for light, for warmth, for anything. Anything that isn’t this.

But somewhere in the midst of my prayers, I am interrupted. I peak my head up from the safety of my knees to see a figure kneeling before me, his head tilted, studying me. His face is scrunched in curiosity and...something else. Pity, perhaps? Which for that, I could not blame him. I set the stage for a pathetic scene.

“The dancing girl,” he says with a smile. His voice is soft, gentle. This unnerves me. Soft and gentle voices are seldom heard in such a loud and busy city in the harshest part of town. But more than his voice are his words. The dancing girl.

“You,” I say, disbelieving.

“Me,” he repeats.

I hold up the check, still clutched in my fist. “Is this some sort of joke?” I ask, angrily.

The man looks withered, tired, and dirty himself. And I know then what I have known all night: The check is a falsity. And yet, he does not strike me as someone who would be so cruel.

I study him, and as I do, I realize that his face might as well be a mirror, because when I look in his eyes, so blue that they are bright even in the darkness, in them I see a loneliness that matches my own. The hollows beneath his eyes, the slump of his mouth, the worry lines etched across his features—there is something familiar about it. Seeing my own pain reflected in his face almost elicits a sudden burst of emotion from me, but I refrain.

“I assure you, no joke has been made,” he answers gently, and he moves to sit beside me against the wall. “You dance with a sadness, a poignant pain that I—” he stops, clutches his chest, “I felt it so prominently, as if it were my heart that was breaking in my chest. Tell me, dancing girl, what elicits such pain, such emotion?”

I think on this a moment. The answer is easy. Though I’ve never been asked, never been questioned, I ponder this same thing every day. Every moment. I endure it, always.

My pain is every piece of myself that I offer to strangers in exchange for spare change.

My pain is every person who fishes change from their wallet without sparing so much as a second glance at me because they don't really care how I have come to be in this situation, they only care that I stay out of their way.

My pain is every harsh intake of a cigarette just to feel the burn in my chest because feeling the burn is better than feeling sad.

Every tear that I allow to fall onto this cracking concrete, because while feeling sad certainly does hurt, the worse thing is feeling nothing at all.

My pain is every hushed prayer to someone, anyone to come save me.

My pain is every profoundly cold night.

My pain is the result of the premature death of my parents and having to grow up too fast in a world that moved even faster and not being able to find a safe place to land. It’s getting my first job. It’s getting my first damp and rotting apartment. It’s being fired from that job for shoplifting food. It’s being subsequently kicked out of that apartment for not being able to pay rent.

My pain is right now. This moment. It’s sitting on the ground with yet another stranger...with absolutely no pieces of myself left to give.

The answer spills out of me suddenly, and it feels like releasing a long held breath. And I don’t know why I trust the words, my story, my pain, the very essence of who I am to this stranger, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because I don’t have anything left to lose anyway.

When I finish, the stranger looks at me for so long that I begin to bristle under his scrutiny. Finally, he pulls out a little black book. It is small and unimpressive. But when he opens it, my eyes scan the hand drawn sketches that seem to leap off the page and come to life before my very eyes. He turns the pages, each drawing sumptuous and awe-inspiring. And it’s only then that a sudden revelation crashes against me and my lungs lose all of their breath.

The remitter on the check. William Perry. A prolific and well-respected artist. Each of his works averages no less than a hundred thousand dollars in value.

“Y-You—” I stammer, words failing me. “You’re William Perry. Y-You—”

“I am a man of humble beginnings,” he says, his fingers still thumbing through the pages. “Who made his start in a similar corner of a similar city with a similar passion.”

His hands stop on a single page. On it, a dark haired girl with a smile wider than the expanse of the galaxy is drawn dancing, her body lifted in mid-air as she twirls with her head tilted towards the sky. The drawing radiates joy and life and my tears fall freely and unapologetically now because just this morning, that girl was me.

“Once I paint this and sell it to a collector, it will fetch an exceedingly high price as all of my paintings do. And this,” he gestures to the check still scrunched inside my fists, “is just your fair share for being the muse behind my newest work of art.”

“You will rise from this corner,” he continues, “like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. And you will hold your head up knowing that it was you, little dancing girl, who changed your life by telling its story, as cold and ugly as it may be, and making it beautiful with your passion, your art, your joy.”

He stands now, tucking his little black book full of wonders back into his pocket.

“I was simply a stranger passing by.”

The man doesn’t so much walk away as he does fade, and it makes me question if he was ever even real in the first place. But the check for $20,000, this tangible thing that I clutch tightly is very much real.

I stand now from the concrete and step out of my corner as the sun begins to rise and spread its light onto the city. I rise with it and step out onto the street. I tilt my head towards the sun’s rays as they shower my skin in warmth and just like that, I feel it. The warmth. The joy. It is its own kind of music. And with it, I do what I’m meant to.

I dance.