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It starts from when you're a little girl, and they shake their heads when you point your toes and twirl around like a little princess.
No, they say.
No dancing.
They buy you other stuff instead; paints and crayons, books, swimsuits, badminton rackets-everything else to stop you from dancing.
For awhile, it was okay.
You grew up reading, writing, playing the piano, swimming, baking, drawing.
There was a bit of everything, and you did enjoy everything.
But then came one day when you were 13 and you learnt how to point your toes.
You learnt to arch your back, stretch a little further, do a split.
And you felt like you found something different, something that's natural to you.
When you were 16, you spent a few days learning something apart from graceful poses. It was a short session with a bunch of friends, but you learnt something called "hiphop" and lyrical expression through movements.
When you were 17, you auditioned for a dance piece in your college dance society, you didn't get through, but it was okay. For the next 2 years, you discovered how amazing your body could be and how to express what words are unable to.
When you were 19, you didn't know what to do. You're out of school, you're trying to get your life back together. You've been dancing once or twice a month but you haven't been too in touch with any of it. Then late one night, you saw a notice calling for auditions for a recital. You thought, "screw it, why not?", signed up and then fell asleep before you could withdraw out from fear. For the next 2 weeks, you wait around for when there's noone in the house, and you practice intensively for those short half hours. On the day of the audition, you went down alone. It was freaky seeing dancers stretch and prep along the corridors, each one seeming more intimidating than the next. When they called your number, you went in and danced. Five minutes later, you were out from your first ever audition at a dance school.
You went home alone.
A few weeks later, the results were out. You got in. You were very happy.
Then the first practice came, and you got the shock of your life when you saw how talented everyone in the team was. You weren't the youngest but everyone was clearly not a new dancer. You were not new either, but sometimes you forget.
With each practice that followed, you learnt something new every time. And slowly you learnt to stop fearing but to shine alongside with the rest. You learnt how to channel your emotions into your movements and soon learnt that it helped you speak the little remaining bits that was left in your chest after all the writings, the music and the crying. It helped you to heal and soothe the little remaining tired bits of your mind and soul.
Dancing helped you in ways that no one else could.
Yet each time you return home, your parents tell you, "it's time to stop".
But how do you stop when dance fixes all the broken parts of you together, even the parts which your parents broke?
How do i make sense of the little remaining illogical bits of life which i am unable to make sense of despite writing, baking and praying?
To them, dance is never an art.
It is an expression of illicit desire, a channel for mistakes to be made.
To me, dance is in everything; the picking of a coin off the floor, a knock on the door, a slow waltz on a wedding day- beautiful.
But there is a bridge between us that i'm struggling with and I don't quite know how to fix it.
A struggle that often only end up in hostile words thrown across the room and muffled cries into the pillow.