Fractured Bodies

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 ground. Sometimes I would try to keep dancing on a chair with only my arms, stretch, or just massage the muscles around my hip, attempting to access the ache in the bone that was growing day by day. 

A month ago, we had accepted that there was something wrong. The doctor discovered a tear in my labrum that I had likely been born with. Most people have similar congenital imperfections in their bodies, he said, and under normal circumstances they would have been fine. I wasn’t normal though. I had decided that I wanted to be a ballerina- I was in a pre-professional company that trained 18 hours a week, and I was good. People cried when I danced, and said that I had a real gift. I almost believed them, because when I danced I felt powerful. Beautiful, in the most real kind of way. I felt like every cell in my body was active and electric- I could feel sparks shooting and bouncing off my skin, like I could reach so far beyond my body that I would lift into the air. 

But it came at a cost. The wrenched, contorted strain of fifth position, the yearning to push into a deeper split, the explosive leaps that had to be higher and higher… it carved into my body and pried apart the small, innocent tear. A steroid was the last resort- if it didn’t relieve my pain, I would have to have surgery and quit ballet, for good. The doctor had made me watch a six inch long needle loaded with blue liquid penetrate my hip on a monitor above my face. My eyes moved back and forth from my body to the screen, as I watched the hilt of the needle disappear into my hip, and the tip of the needle reach closer and closer to the bone on the screen. It was weird to think that it was my bone, that the magic I felt through movement was upheld by this buried scaffolding. I still remembered the weird sort of pain- the visceral, wrong kind of pain. 

As I lay looking out at the bodies of my classmates moving in elaborate adagio, allegro, the floor felt cold against my backless leotard. My hip ached, badly, and I knew it would continue to. My eyes drifted down from the dancers to the ground, a scuffed, beat-up Marley floor that bore the marks of thousands of hours of rehearsals. It was still reflective, capturing the lovely fleshy hues of dancing bodies shimmering across the sweeping scuffs. On the floor, my friends' bodies became fractured, abstract, unstable, too.