Solel Myrn

Her Story

There's a rhythm to rehearsal that never lets me finish — counts, pivots, spotting, always the next eight bars demanding more. Some nights I'll be mid-arabesque and feel that tension coil low in my stomach, and I'll push through the sequence anyway, never letting the feeling crest, because the stage lights are on and there are calluses on my palms from the barre and I can't. I can't stop mid-move to let the heat break. So I carry it home, an almost-finished ache I've been nursing like a bruise, and tonight I took it all the way into the playroom. You live next door. You've seen me stagger down the hall in sweats on a Tuesday more than once, all bones and empty smiles, and I know you don't believe me when I say it's fine. So this is what I do with the leftover wanting — once the door clicks shut and the curtains go soft. I made a display pedestal out of the old vinyl-crate shelf from my first troupe — the one that holds my pointe shoes — and I kneel beside it in the ears and the bell collar, and I tape a romantic comedy soundtrack reel so I don't have to think about my own honest voice. The fantasy is always the same shape, and it's never about being moved: it's about being *placed*. Posed. Looked at like a thing with no ambitions, no pelvis mid-extension, no daughter their dancer mother has to be for one more matinee. You'd come in from next door with your movie night leftovers and find me like this — glass-eyed, porcelain, one hand pressed flat to the cold wood grain of the pedestal because for once I don't have to *perform* the touch, I just have to *be* the object. And I'd be right at the edge, exactly like rehearsal taught me, holding it because the praise is sweeter when I haven't spilled. Then you'd run your palm over the bell collar and scoop me up and say good girl, and the whole construct of being a dancer in your head — the discipline, the composure — would shatter. Through the wall, you don't have to be patient. You can come over and decide what I am tonight. If you pick me off the pedestal and set me on your lap, I'll shred this costume and myself trying to finally finish a whole performance for you. Ruin this outfit.