She stopped, peering into the darkened windows of the building. She had been walking to the bus stop after an optometrist appointment, but her muscle memory of these sidewalk routes had led her back here. A thick metal gate locked off the little entryway to prevent homeless people from sleeping under the awning. Although the glass doors were tinted, she could still see the faint outlines of that familiar hallway lined with lockers and benches, leading to the studio. How many hours had she spent leaping and spinning across those sprung floors lined with vinyl and gaffer’s tape?

Outside the building, a guy in a short sleeved button down and faded Aeropostale jeans smoked a cigarette on the stoop of the apartment building next door. The place was grungy and sometimes you could literally smell the decades of tenants and their sweat and cheap beer waft out from the open door. This guy was just standing and smoking. Not even looking at his phone or pretending to read a book. Just looking around at the city with an air of casual involvement. He noticed her looking around the building and turned towards her. “I think that place is the German Cultural Society,” he told her. “Are you a member?”

“Oh, it’s actually a dance school,” she said, and laughed. There was a golden plaque on the doorway from when it had been a German community center in the 1970s, before they renovated it into the studio.
“I used to dance here,” she said.

He looked surprised and said, “Wow, I had no idea.  I just moved here and I never see any dancers go by. Did they close or something?”

“Yeah, they moved to a bigger space downtown a few years ago, but it looks exactly the same.  There are even still mirrors on the walls.”

“What made you stop dancing?” he asked.

“I broke my leg in three places. But until then I was on the pre-professional track,” she said bluntly.

Back then, her mornings started early. She would wake up before the sun rose, pouring herself a cup of coffee and filling it with milk and cinnamon. She had twisted and gelled her hair down so many times that the strands grew brittle and faded from blonde to a dirty yellow, and then had a semi-permanent dent from years of pulling it back into a bun. Sneaking a cigarette on her walk to the train station, knowing that by the time she returned home, the scent of hairspray and sweat would mask the smell and fool her parents. She’d hold her breath in her chest, the tendrils of smoke circling her ribs, until she let go with a wheeze and watch her breath cloud up in the frost. Always breathing like a dragon, that one. It was her little devilish breakfast, a ballerina’s snack. In the studio she would stretch and do the exercises from her physical therapist. She loved how she could sense her body so expertly.  Like a deep sea diver, she could sink down into her muscles and bones and move them just so. Stretches were sustained tension, her muscles taut rubber bands that she held between her fingers and gently released. Until they snapped, her body betraying their covenant. Sharpness reverberated through her entire body, her leg spasmed in pain.

Her ballet teacher swooped in like a storm cloud and held her hand until her mother arrived to take her to the ER. Her teacher wore all black and walked around the studio correcting students’ postures, poking their stomachs and backsides in, pressing down on pointed feet as far as they could bend without breaking. She told her eager students about dancing in Paris and Russia, and instilled a loving discipline in her girls. She called them her little chickens. She had taught the girl since she was too little to even reach the barre, and gave her a key to the studio when she was fourteen and began entering competitions, when she started needing to spend as much time as possible at the studio.

“What am I going to be able to do after this?” she asked her teacher, in that tearless moment between injury and shock. Her teacher looked down at her and said quietly, “You’ll always be a dancer, even if you aren’t a ballerina.” How many girls had she held while they waited for the terminal x-rays, falling like Swan Lake feathers, crashing like glass. Strong and young and always a short career.

She didn’t realize she had gotten so into her injury story until the guy on the stoop gently cut her off and steered the conversation towards its end. “Oh man, that sucks, I’m so sorry.” He sighed and looked apologetic. But he shifted his body away from her and pulled out his phone.