¿Libretto Crescendo?

It was a Saturday afternoon. At 1pm I began to get ready. In the weeks prior I had finalized the arrangements, calling off work, rearranging my time trying to account for writing and research projects, tearing apart my house until I found the same dress I had worn to aperitivos in Italy; dark red, not as fancy as an evening gown, but elaborate enough to pass as something appropriate, overlain with lace into an artfully high neckline. My life gradually simplified itself into to the art of counting time, rearranging entire days trying to make room for one more beautiful thing. At this point the ritual of dressing up had fallen a little out of favor. What I had once considered ritual gradually lost its grip on my muscle memory, becoming static, the metaphorical muscles weak and unused. Half-remembered.  What used to take three minutes takes me almost half an hour, not only slow, but tripped up due my constant double checking, taking the time to measure and reassure myself that it’s possible to rebecome someone I used to be. That I am still someone I recognize.

This is less a tale about the merits of feminism and the expectations placed on women as it is about the things I am used to doing to signify to myself that I am doing “okay”. That I’m happy. That that which I am, I have remained. Eating because I’m hungry rather than out of habit, waking up before waking up becomes an absolute necessity, spending more time with the people who know how to hold me up when they can tell I’m slipping because I enjoy laughing with them rather than pushing them away. Typically I enjoy making up my face. The art of applying colors is calming, my hands exerting that small amount of care and control. I enjoy spending half an hour deliberating over which clothes are clean enough, finding a way to make a thousandfold shirt seem new again. It’s part of who I am. I’m careful, and that measure of control seems like just the right amount of security. And like always, every so often depression begins to erode those joys slowly. It makes these arbitrary things seem even more arbitrary. It becomes harder to email my professors let alone talk to my friends, harder to get up, easier to fall asleep, harder to enjoy simple things let alone attempt the momentous task of righting myself. To put the whole affair succinctly - I forget.

And it’s strange, because you can forget a lot of things when you’re apathetic enough not to care, but you can also forget things when you’re happy. Mostly, I forget how to cope. I know that this (moments spent too long in silence, tiredness, the immutable lacking), like a bad cold or a violent storm, will blow over, disappearing back into myself just as quickly as it came. I choose to take this path rather any other. I choose it because I know that whatever this feeling is, and no matter how much I begin to hurt, that it will not last forever. At the end of the day I know my life more or less follows the Law of Returns and Averages. For every low there will be a high at the end of the tunnel, but predictably, none of this makes living through the low any easier.

Most of the time I rediscover who I can be by accident. By attending an event that forces me out of bed on a weekend. And on weekdays I have music that begins crooning at 6 am, a poem read or written over lunch, attending friends’ small town art exhibitions, watching old midnight movies at the art theater downtown; yet another reason to drink coffee past dark, the girl next to me, our knees brushing, hands grappling for popcorn in the dark.

So on a carefully arranged Saturday afternoon I manage to put the various pieces I identify myself with together, the makeup, my nice red red dress, my bag equipped with a copy of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and a two-piece pack of gum. The four of us pile into Kara’s car and listen to her music (the Front Bottoms, Jenny O., various other indie artists) for an hour down the interstate, the dark rumble of her car speeding apart beneath us, heading to the nearest performing arts center. We find a place to park. We watch an old lady and her granddaughter cross the street. We talk idly about where we might want to eat after the show. We wait in line to collect the tickets we reserved, posters advertising Swan Lake are plastered along all the doors, the principal dancers engaged in some sweeping entanglement, limbs and the lift making them seem like extensions of the same person.

In some ways we are entangled like that, our own careful knots marking time. Watching this ballet done by a bonafide Russian company seems endlessly romantic to me, as if I will see the production the way it was meant to be seen. The granddaughter tugs on her grandmother’s skirt, trying to get her attention. The whole scene reminds me of my own grandma attending my  dance recitals at age five or six, her face disappearing from the room as my little feet trip over themselves into position. We still place small, pink pointe shoes on our Christmas tree every year in her honor. Sometimes the softness of her voice, low and sweet, echoes through me in moments of despair, my own mind trying to remember a time when there was no such thing as emptiness.

Before the production begins I read the plot synopsis for each scene, wanting to see if I can pinpoint where each event happens as it is acted out. When the Prince realizes he must now govern, retreating into solitude, falling in love with Odette as the sound of sweeping Tchaikovsky violins fill the air, drums and woodwinds lifting the dancers up and accompanying them back down, from earth to heaven and back again.

It’s ballet. It’s beautiful. The Court Jester steals the show for all of us, displaying as much skill (if not more) than Prince Siegfried himself, always competing. He shows us the world as a mirror image, holding up the glass and forcing us to look at what kinds of things we’ve become in absentia, unaware. Rothbart flashes back and forth, tempting from smoke filled shadows. The production itself is very traditional, but that makes the dance no less beautiful. Afterwards Kara comments on the sheer physicality that must be required of every dancer. I’m almost sure that if we’d had binoculars we could have seen the sweat pouring down Odette’s smiling face.

As I listen to the music again I can recall each scene, where the players jetéd, soaring, Odile’s infamous 32 fouette turns. But even now, months afterward, the one scene we all still find lacking is the Prince’s moment of redemption. We scoff a little. What good is a promise if it can be so easily broken and mended back together again? He broke her heart, and the most truthful part of me still believes he should have lived to see her die instead. Many productions act some variation of the betrayal scene out, but it’s a coin toss as to whether true love weathers the storm or whether the Prince or Odette cradles the other in their arms as life violently forsakes them. In our production true love won over all. Evil curses, meddling sorcerers, broken promises, none of that mattered in the end. They loved each other, and as a result they were always destined to be happy.

And maybe one of the reasons why I find this scenario so hard to accept is because it doesn’t reflect the reality I live with. And the thing is, I don’t think it’s true for anyone. I don’t think we’re destined to be happy, or that everything will be okay in the end. Even the Law of Averages accounts for times of darkness and despair, for tragedy as well as periods of relief. But the one thing I always forget, the one thing I always find myself rediscovering, the thing I forsake, is the power of art to help me persevere. That music at 6 am, reading a poem by my favorite poet, sometimes the same poem over and over again trying to figure out how I can split my own head open in order to see the honeysuckles, all of this helps me fill the silences. Moments when the music stops, when there is no more honeysuckle left in me, when I am gaping and void. Something must place a pen in my hand and put it to paper. For me, this is the first step I always take to recovery. I schedule events I have no choice but to commit to. I listen to songs the girl I love sends me, the songs all my friends have shared with me over the years compiled into a playlist I shuffle ad infinitum, repeating. I write a poem. I pick up an oil pastel. I begin to heal myself from wounds that are no one’s fault.

When I feel well enough, I find a sunny patch in the kitchen and lay down in it. Eventually my dogs wander in, lured by the sound of the soft and vibrant things I’ve layered around myself, and lay in the sunny patch with me. There’s an art to keeping yourself alive, and relearning that is sometimes the most difficult act of strength I’ve ever found within myself. I discover who I am, and I begin to care about the person that I find. I may not be okay, but take a small measure of control from the knowledge that I’m coping, that I can make art and by some logic this makes me feel more like the human being I’ve been missing.

Somewhere a violin plays, the notes lifting up and back down again, reverting in the end back and back again into air. I breathe. Somehow, it makes sense.