I don’t know what it was about today that inspired me to press send, to write the message I’d crafted fragments of for weeks. I noticed when the emails stopped, don’t think I didn’t. I know I’ve been a poor correspondent.

Perhaps it’s all this god damned growth. This year’s lengthy list of demands so that I may pass freely out the other side. 29 is the DMV line of life. An endless string of having papers stamped and papers rejected and being sent to the back of the line. How frequently must I dot the same i’s and cross the same t’s? In any case, something had to give and this was it.

I felt the pain in my ankle today. Just a faint gun-to-the-temple kind of sensation to remind me that I’m still in its clutches. It allows me to walk but it only might allow me to dance. But is that it? Is that truly why I pressed send? The truth is, after my injury in 2021, I held a finger in the page of my book. I mentally saved a place for myself right where I left off. And when I dropped back in, the setting had changed. My peers had been knighted, the whole courtyard full of dames I didn’t recognize. And everyone was moving at double speed. In real-time, I was being lapped by people who had just entered the studio as I was sitting on bed rest.

Did I leave because of my injury or because the moment I came back, my love for it died? Did my grand aspirations of being a ballerina kill my passion for dance like the befallen nose spiting the face? Is it ego, or wisdom, or simply time that lead me to the doorstep of this email? I have only to hang my hat on my courier’s good intentions, on humanity’s undying propensity for second chances. I have to trust in the thing that left those emails unread. I have to intuit what I can and have faith in the rest.

I don’t know how to reconcile a version of my identity that doesn’t contain “ballerina”. And that’s what’s kept me lingering on its doorstep like an unwelcome guest for so long. I’ll put the ballet barre in the basement, find some new outlet for this newfound time, deposit my passion somewhere where it will appreciate. With good faith and good will, we do the hard things we’re called to with just enough blindness and just enough belief that something else is waiting to rush in.