Beethoven

Beethoven

It felt endless. Life laid out, lived before the age of twenty. Residuals, dances, marriage, kids, grow old, die; the same old story only the names changing. Was it possible that there was something else out there? Was there another story that no one had yet had the opportunity to live? Or is everyone destined to exist heading in the same direction?

Her hands hung out of the window, forearms digging into the ledge where the wooden frame containing the glass was suppose to sit; she didn’t notice the increasing pain surging through them. Her mind was on the water. So calm, quiet and by choice. Nothing to do with what someone else wanted, or what it was suppose to do, no rules or regulations; just…freedom.

She was gone. Her thoughts had taken her from the her hard wood floors to running her fingers through the clear blue ocean, grinding the sand along the beach lines in between her toes. There was no residual there, no dancing, no Tomas and best of all: no mother. Just water.

She rested her head against the glass, Beethoven’s 7th symphony playing in the background. A lock of her hair dropped into her eyes, she ignored it: forcing herself to forget.

The sun sat on the edge of the world, seeming everlasting; and she felt as if this moment would last for eternity. Her eyes closed as she took in the smell of the water, the smell of freedom. Back in this room she was trying so hard to get away from; Beethoven called for her by her mothers name.

“Marie…Marie,” in its soft tone it screamed: echoing off the walls crying for her to return to reality. She could feel her tutu pushed up against the cement wall and her leotard excused the heat from of her legs creating shivers across them.

She drifted out to the water, allowing the wind to guide her hair, pushing it back out of her face, forcing the strains to dance across the air. Bending her knees as she walked across the body of water, her hands dipped into it, the water being surprising warm as she swished around a fraction of it with her fingers.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this free; maybe this was the first. Like the water had opened something up in her that nothing could have ever before. Or maybe it was cause today, for the first time she was alone as she glided across the hard wood floors and practiced her turnout with a hand clinging to the bar.

Today there was no one to tell her she wasn’t practicing hard enough, no one to push her to do ‘her best’, no one to enforce their own dreams upon her.

She stopped forcing herself out the window, in order to return to the room. She began to notice how cold her legs had become and the numbness now setting inside her arms: as she started to move away from the window. There was a wooden chair beside the small oak table that held the record player that now cried out in the violins and cellos of Beethoven. She moved toward it, sitting on the cold wood. Her knees clenched together as she picked up the frame on the small table and looked at it.

The woman in the picture was young; her curly coffee colored hair framed a thin face and her slim figure was covered in a tight black summer dress. Her arms were stretched out in a doorframe and her head leaned on the door. Her eyes were a turquoise color in nature, but through the black and white splotches in the photo they seemed almost ash like. Her lips parted into a smile so beautiful it captivated anyone who saw it. Her name was Marie.

Emily sat for hours in the chair staring at her mother. As she looked at her she wondered what she had inherited from Marie. Her hair was too dark, her nose too big and her lips were undersized. The only evidence her mother left in her was a slim figure and steady feet. And a dream; to dance.

For all the time she had spent in this room with Marie, and how lonely and empty she had felt when she stood next to her; now that she was gone the world seemed to stop turning.

Emily couldn’t think of what to do now. All her life her mother had forced her to dance, told her her feet could do something no one else’s could and being blessed with that beauty she should embrace it. That’s way she was doing ballet since she was five, never missing a day: until today.

So she sat there, in a wooden chair: in the room that echoed Beethoven and called out her mother’s name. She felt forgotten, left behind. There was only one question on her mind, one question that she couldn’t quite find the answer too:
What do I do now?