Blood and Ballet (PREVIEW ONLY)

Chapter 1 - Ballet

To be a ballerina is to be immortal, or so we tell ourselves. We must live for the here and now. We cannot afford to think about death. We cower away from consideration of our future. We hide signs of aging behind face paint and costumes. After all, blemishes are a show of imperfection. Such symptoms are for mortals.

If immortality is the heart of ballet, then perfection is certainly its god. It took me a long time to figure this out. Ballet changed my life. Had you asked me when I was younger, I would have told you that ballet was simply dancing. Now I will tell you differently.

Ballet is darkness—beautiful obsessive darkness. It rips you apart from the inside. Sometimes it's fragile as glass, one small chip and it shatters into a thousand glittering fragments. Other times it's raw, unforgiving, powerful, and yet, graceful.

People only see the sparkles and tutus. They see the smiling women on grand stages painted like dolls, and the gallant princes who rescue them. They don't see the pain beneath those bright faces; they don't see the suffering.

And the ballerinas themselves? They all dream of becoming principle soloists, prima ballerinas, lured in by the delusional fantasy that if they put in all the hard work, all the sweat, the tears, the man hours, they will be chosen. They will be special. The one. Who doesn't like the sound of that? How many of them actually make it?

I did...once.

The official diagnosis was a tear in my labrum and a spiral fracture to my left femur. When I asked the doctor if I would dance again she said, "Perhaps." What does that mean?

After that, I went nearly a year without putting on a single pair of pointe shoes. I could hardly bear to look at them. I simply tucked them away, even the ones I'd gotten signed by famous ballerinas, deep in my closet. I didn't need the reminder of my misfortune.

I never danced the same after my injury; my body could no longer handle the rigor of it. The National Ballet agreed to take me back of course. I had a track record with them. That wasn't the real reason. My rich grandfather was a huge donor to the company. It pays to have connections. Naturally I was demoted to corps. As you can imagine, everything went downhill from there.

My friends in the company were no longer my friends: they whispered behind my back same as the rest of them. Funny how people dissociate with you when you no longer have something to offer them, when you're no longer somebody. I couldn't walk into a room without turning heads and spurring whispers.

"Why did Cece come back?" I once heard someone say.

"She should give up and accept her fate. Let the rest of us have a turn." That one hurt the most.

Maybe they didn't think I heard their nasty little remarks. That's what I'd tell myself setting up at the barre. In hindsight, they wanted to be overheard; they wanted to tear me down; they wanted to remind me that my dreams were naive. They were right, because my dreams shattered the moment I hit the hard wooden floor.

Ballet is to blame for the turn my life took. Perhaps I could have chosen a normal path like a teacher or a doctor. Something reasonable. How differently things would have turned out had I done so. Now I could clearly see my life stretched out behind me. My past decisions culminated into a single sharp and painful moment. In that single moment, everything changed.

It was late at night in the city of Vienna when I was attacked and forcefully dragged into the back of a black van. Everything moved so quickly that I couldn't question what was happening. I soon found myself caged within in a tiny room, but otherwise unharmed. Only then did I criticize my choices as my helpless gaze circled this new enclosure, surroundings bare of all but the necessities. The mind can be a strange thing during impossible situations.