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I was laying on the cold, sticky Marley floor, stretching my hips in a figure-four position. It was becoming a bit of a routine at this point- I would barely make it halfway through barre before I would feel the increasingly familiar twinge in my left hip. As soon as we got to grand-battement, it would have grown from an untuned violin string pluck to a hammer clanging anvil. I would shamefully excuse myself from the rest of class, try to make the most use of my time on the g

At this point, it really wasn’t serious, but I was laying awake in my hole, distressed. The hole was the closet space in the basement that had become my bedroom as my father renovated the upstairs. It was an odd setup- it was sort of an alcove set into the wall that was big enough for a bed, and Daddy had built me a special ladder to climb up into it. He told me it was like I was climbing into a treehouse, or like I was a music box ballerina. I would put on performances for

During the pandemic, we were all sequestered to a small but beautiful college campus that boasted 13,000 acres of forest and the most dense concentration of caves in the southeast. I had always been intimidated by it, but one day I became brave and bored enough to go on a caving trip. In a small group of other students led by members of the outing program, we traipsed halfway down the steep plateau to reach the cave’s opening. The first trial of the cave was referred to as “t