Emilia
Six Years Later
I lookedout on stage as the dancer did the final number to Giselle, and instead of feeling like I had accomplished something, all I felt was empty.
Empty and sad.
This was it.
This was the end, and I wasn’t even sure if the company would hire me on again to be an assistant choreographer. They’d never said it, and this position had been a contracted one.
I was feeling about ten shades of stupid for packing my whole life in Boston and moving down to New York for something so temporary, but for the last ten months, this production had been my entire life.
And a part of me didn’t regret it.
It was exactly the kind of place I needed to surround myself with, to remind myself that I had loved ballet before. That I had been obsessed with it. That it had been my dream.
My mom’s dream.
Then she died when I was thirteen, and ballet became less of an obsession, and more of a painful reminder of all I’d lost. Ballet wasn’t fun anymore. But I kept going because it reminded me of her, of all the hours and hard work we had put into my training, and because my dad loved seeing me dance.
I knew it reminded him of Mom, and he hadn’t been able to let her go. He hadn’t even looked at another woman since her death, and a part of me truly believed he would remain single for the rest of his life.
Some people only get one true love in their life, and I knew my mom was that person for my dad. I had been trying to set him up after five years, hoping he would be open to dating, for no other reason than I needed him to be strong enough to show me how to move on from her death.
Because, fuck, if he hadn’t gotten over her death by now, I wasn’t sure how I could possibly try to get over it myself.
She had been my hero, and for most of my childhood and the beginning of my adolescence, she had been my entire world. Which made her abrupt departure that much harder to accept.
Around me, people in the auditorium clapped. I got out of my daydream, clapping as well, though I hadn’t even realized it had ended already.
This was it.
By tomorrow morning, I would be unemployed.
The company hadn’t contacted me to offer another job. They rarely hired out contracted work, but they had been in the beginning stages of productions when their assistant choreographer had caught a nasty bug and was out of commission for a month. They had to let her go and bring in someone to take her place.
She was back and healthy now, and what was more, she got a contract with the company.
Which meant she would be back at her old job soon enough and I didn’t know if The New York Ballet had another position in their company for me, even if I had been trained under Nadir Abernathy.
Her reputation was probably one of the biggest reasons the company had hired me in the first place, despite my age.
I had wanted to move to New York to get out of the funk I found myself in when I had moved back home to Boston from London. Hell, I had probably been in a funk since long before I left for London, and I didn’t know why.
Ballet had been a huge part of my life ever since I was three and my mom took me to her studio. Everyone said I had a gift for it. And Mom had taken that and dedicated most of her life to training me to be the best.
After my graduation, The London Ballet Theater, a sister company to Bowing’s Dance Academy–where I’d trained–had offered me a position in their corps de ballet rank. It was a beginning level for the company, but it had been a huge opportunity, considering how few dancers actually got offered a position at all.
Though I had seen it as the beginning of my professional dance career, it hadn’t felt like the relief I thought it would be. It hadn’t felt like the beginning of a hopefully long and successful career. Instead it felt like a weight I had no longer wanted to carry.
I turned them down, much to Nadir’s disappointment, but I had stayed behind at Bowing’s two years after my graduation and worked alongside her.
Nadir was a small and slight lady who never had kids and, despite her talent, had never done more in her career except to establish a reputation for herself as one of the top trainers in the field. Most, if not all, of her students had gone on to compete and win the Prix Benois de la Danse, and fuck, I didn’t know when I had stopped wanting that.
But I did, and I didn’t care.
After earning a degree from my 150K education, I didn’t want it anymore, but I didn’t know how to tell the people I loved most, the people who had sacrificed so much just to make it possible for me that it was the case.