Plies and Pages

The Book I Keep Rewriting (and Sometimes Forget to Read)

There are books I’ve read twice.

Sometimes.

Maybe.

But I have to wait long enough that I forget what happens.

Otherwise? I get bored.

Predictability is one of those itchy sweaters I can’t wait to tear off. If I can guess the next sentence, the magic’s gone. The spell breaks. We’re just pretending now.

And yet.

Predictability also soothes me.

Isn’t that wild? Like, when I’m anxious or sad or spiraling just a bit too hard, I crave routines. I want to know exactly what happens next. I want plies and tendus and rond de jambes like a warm hug.

I want tea in my favorite mug, and cats on my lap, and the safety of a day that unfolds exactly as expected.

It’s Thursday, and Thursday is ballet.

At least, it’s supposed to be.

That’s the ritual. That’s the spine of the book I’ve been writing with my body for over a year now. But this morning I woke up with a crick in my neck (thanks, getting older! so kind of you!), and now I’m doing the dance of maybe I should rest, but also it’s been WEEKS because of the teacher’s shows and then my vacation, and I miss it. I CRAVE it.

And next week I’ll be in Detroit with the minions (the small ones, not the yellow ones), which means if I don’t go this week, it’ll be TWO MORE WEEKS and that feels criminal.

And yet… the crick.

Getting older is wild.

Getting older after being a professional dancer is a whole other flavor of frustrating.

A colleague once said, “You get hurt a lot—do you not want to be here?” and I nearly laughed myself into a pulled hamstring. I get hurt a lot because I used to be here. Like, really here. Ten years of pirouettes and pas de chats and performances that left everything on the stage. And now? Now, I just want to move because it feels good.

But my muscles are like “we remember what you did to us in 2007, and we are not going quietly.”

So I go to class and I try to feel instead of fix.

I try not to treat barre as drills but as a way to listen to my body. I forget sometimes. But then I remember.

That I like to jump!

That I hate turning!

That I know how to extend through the tips of my fingers and into the future.

That my body can still surprise me, like an old book I haven’t read in ages, and suddenly—plot twist!—I fall in love with a sentence I forgot I knew.

Right now there’s a cat on my lap, which is influencing my sentence structure. We’re both a little softer these days. She used to be a jittery ball of nope and now she’s a full-on lap cat. I’m her emotional support human, and she’s mine, and we’ve both evolved into beings who don’t need as much chaos, though we both still flirt with it.

Because yes.

Sometimes I get bored.

Sometimes life feels like a script I didn’t even audition for. And when that happens, I go looking for the plot twist. I chase novelty, ride the rollercoaster, embrace chaos. Until—inevitably—I need the rituals again. The calm. The old familiar cadence of a life I can hum along to.

Some people find that in religion. A text they return to, again and again. Dog-eared, underlined, memorized. That was never me. The Bible didn’t hit that note for me, no matter how many times I tried to sing along.

But I still want that. I crave a book like that. A book I can return to when I wake up hurting. When I forget who I am. When I just need someone—even if it’s past me—to tell me I’m okay.

So. I’m writing one.

For myself.

With ideas I want to remember, like:
“As above, so below. There’s a universe inside you.”
And: “You are worthy. Full stop. No conditions.”

I want a book that holds me the way a perfect plie does. A book I forget and then rediscover and love all over again. A book where the next page always has the chance to surprise me.

What about you?

What’s your old favorite book?
What passage do you whisper to yourself when the world gets loud?
And what book are you secretly writing, word by word, inside?

I’d love to read it someday.