When I dance for the kitchen window, the mirror it becomes in the dark, I become shapeless. Like my soul feels. No longer a female body—or male—but an artform; my representation of authenticity. I couldn’t place this feeling until very recently—feeling gender-less—until I understood that movement was freedom and my body is a cage. I have always danced for that window, watched myself grow up in that room. Snap-shots of my life; learning my left and right from the arts & crafts table, play-dough in my hands, my sister’s feet in my hands as we wheelbarrowed each other from the couch to the kitchen. Cello bow in my hands as I serenade my paintings on the wall. Life in my hands as I bend air to my chest, push the dysphoric hollow out that fills me.
When I dance I become concrete.
I do not write this as a dancer, not in the traditional sense. I took ballet in elementary school, in the studio that has become the site of my high school health class. Then I took jazz, and ballet again, two years each, and an online hip-hop course when COVID hit. But it was never about professionalism for me, it was about fluidity. I’ve watched countless dance shows on Netflix, and no matter how tired I become of the same academy-school drama that runs through the veins of every new plot, when the characters dance, they become beauty, they become light, and that is the allure. The band The Killers ask, “Are we human, or are we Dancer?” It recently dawned on me that there is no difference. Bodies; in movement. We are gravity, and we are flight.
Most of the time now I wish I could erase my body; leave the rest of me. And not because I am particularly religious, but because I am a poet, and in dealing with gender-identity I believe there is naturally a spiritual aspect to it. If only I had known what unsettled me when my ninth grade tennis captain called us “girls.” If only I had understood why it had rattled me so much when my friend changed their pronouns and their name. I was next to cut off all my hair, leaving curls like I had when I was young. My dad said it looked like a boy’s cut and I remember asking myself if I liked the way boy sounded in my heart—but that wasn’t it yet. I remember standing in the hall between the men’s and women’s sections of clothing stores, thinking my confliction was for the same reason everybody else complained about out-dated gender-norms. I think about my journey now; playing four-square on asphalt courts with the boys, taking my ex-girlfriend to Homecoming, and for as long as I can remember, being called an old-soul, years out of my body.
Out of my body. Space, my best friend said, classifying my gender. All the stars, I typed back, smiling because this was the first time anyone had ever made confusion feel wonderful.
Dance is about control. Movement makes the body holy again, artificial temple to ruins again; lived in. It is an escape from a feeling of living outside of myself. For that window, for the high trees outside and the moon, I am me. Just me, and it is a breathlessly liberating feeling. Body-positivity becomes hard to promote unless I think about each part separately, but tell me I am made of skin and arms and hips and eyes and I will believe you. I am the flesh mold for my soul. Perhaps that floor space, window, square of security, was the only place I danced before. Only place I let go aside from in my journal. But I have started dressing according to what my body feels; wrote she/they at the bottom of my email and came out to friends. I can feel myself on the way to being proud in public spaces. And while I believe the body is naturally limiting to most people, sore and easily broken—especially for dancers—that is all the more reason to continue listening to the music inside of you, until you train your feet again—that were always born artists and honest—to dance for you. To find freedom.