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What you do when you’re not here counts as much, if not more, as what you do when you’re here.
Their normal world was hiding here somewhere, a lost sock in the dryer.
Real people didn’t have fireplaces or live in Christmas-card houses like these, where they couldn’t hear other people moving and cooking in the spaces above, below, and beside their own sounds and smells.
Esme. You’re so deep in la-la land all the time. The only reason you’re not pissed and angry about all of this is because you probably believe everything that fucked-up psychic said,
Madeline made a dry, huffy sound. “You’ll probably be just fine because you can’t see it, and the rest of us will go crazy.”
“It’s probably better that way. Don’t let me ruin your delusional world.”
The Waltz Girl so willingly falling and being picked up, carried off to nowhere.
“Were they supposed to be some kind of angels carrying her away?”
supposed to have meaning. He said once that Serenade was just ‘a dance in the moonlight’ and nothing more.” “That’s impossible,” Esme said. She
if you’re ever the Waltz Girl, you can project whatever emotions you feel into that role, and the audience will carry them away. In that sense, Esme, it means something different every time because no two dancers ever dance a part exactly alike. And no two watchers will ever see it the same way. What I’m trying to say, Esme, is that there’s a place for everything you’re feeling.”
At night, she watched videos of Anna Pavlova or Galina Ulanova, a reminder of the big picture, that all the right pieces were sliding into place. She fell asleep to Bach or Mendelssohn, to music she used now or would use one day, while her brain processed what she’d learned that day and sorted it into place.
We can’t be everything all the time. That just wouldn’t be life.”
There was a poem she’d read once about grief, the only one that got it right, that told the world to stop clocks and put away the stars and the ocean because life was over.
she was exorbitantly grateful for the world she’d stumbled into, for not stopping the clocks but pushing them forward instead.
We all come from the same place, Esme thinks, finding a story in choreography that isn’t meant to have one. We write our own journey. She’s always written her own journey.
Nick was his own moon now, cold and orbiting his family in the same distant way they all were.
“They have something in common, the shell and the glass. They’ve both been pushed around by the ocean. It doesn’t make them any less beautiful or exciting to find, does it? Only more so.”
She just needs to find her closet full of costumes. Esme thought of that night at Amelia’s. Something that pushes her from the world she knows into the one that comes next. I’ll help you find it, she promised silently. We’ll all help you find it.
