Let us begin at the beginning. 

There were walls and there was light. There was something, something half of fighting. There was justice, elusive, elusive like light on a moonless night. I stood between the windows that flanked me on the walls that flanked me in the room with windows on either wall facing the other, me caught between. I stood dancing. I sat dancing. I shat dancing. I cried dancing. They said that I could be dancing, become dancing, dancing itself, that I could become dancing itself if I would just… 

But which pain are we speaking of? Let us begin at the beginning. It was in a room made of walls and windows and between the walls, on each of them a massive window where light flooded in, that I learned to dance. High Noon at every hour, in every sense. I was a girl of six, sixteen, six again at sixteen in how I was and how I was ever becoming. Sixteen going on six going on sixteen and somehow always six. My first steps into that room at the age of six. I never grew older, even as I did.

Everything that could not speak was my friend. The piano, its vibration. The window, its glass hot of sunlight. The dust falling in the light while the piano pulsed a rhythm that I felt inside my feet. They were all my friends. I knew friendship as the absence of speech. Because speech. Speech. Speech was hostile. Speaking was not friendship. Words spoken were not the gifts of friends. I would hate to be an actress. I would hate to 

make my work the beautification of what is inherently cruel. Words. I wanted to be a dancer. Innocent, ignorant at first, I wanted to be a dancer. And I learned to love all that is mute in the process. Because the words spoken to make me what I am were cruel. I learned to be a dancer. To suffer words in private. So I could, one bright day, flourish in silence upon a brilliant stage. The piano, its orchestra silent. The applause, thunderous, silent. They would say nothing. They would be mute. Insofar as they spoke to me, without words. All that would speak to me with meaning, the one true meaning I sought by dancing. All of that would be spoken without words. 

On m’a dit à plusieurs reprises et quand je dis “on” je veux dire que c’était elle qui me l’a dit, la maîtresse qui m’a dit à plusieurs reprises, qui me disait claques jour, Bethany, t’es trop bête, trop têtue, trop conne. Combien de fois je t’ai dit, ce mouvement commence  par les reins et finit par les seins, ton sourire un épanouissement qui marque l’accomplissement de l’acte ? Et toi pourtant tu le fais comme tu es un parpaing—saisie en intégrité de bête, de solide et de bête. Tu es bête. Tu es une bête. Les danseuses c’est des surhumaines. Toi, t’es pas même humaine. T’es bête. Tu es une bête.