An Open Letter To The Dancers Walking To The Edge Dance Center Next To My Gym [An Unexpected Purge]

On any given day I pass you shouldering your duffle bags as you make your way into an intermediate modern, hip hop or barre technique class, ready to stretch, gyrate and twirl for an hour in a mirrored room smelling of sweat and resin, and I lower my gaze as I hurry by.

Or sometimes I stick out my jaw and stare straight ahead. It varies, but the truth of my end of the encounter does not.

Please know that – rational or not – for myself and perhaps for others who are braving the treadmill even though we are a bit out of shape or doughy or haven’t seen our tricep muscle, well, ever – your unstudied, bonelessly lithe pixie-visage greeting our sweat soaked form as we hobble out to the parking lot after a spin class like a bow-legged chimpanzee is relentlessly intimidating.

Your graceful stride and slender form – obvious even under what seems a dozen or so layers of perfectly mismatched clothing under the summer sun – is something that many of us couldn’t dream of pulling off, even if we subsisted on only tofu, carrots and a daily relationship with the stair master.

Although I don’t know you, your happiness or your health personally, and as someone who studied dance in my formative years but would never consider myself to be a true dancer, I am jealous.

I move out of your path and shuffle past in my bleach-stained sweats and corporate softball t-shirt and all the hard work and perspirative progress that I have just experienced dissolves and is momentarily rendered pointless. You are simply too cool.

Some social truisms never seem to change.

In conclusion, I ask that perhaps the next time you pass by someone like me – someone who still feels the need to curl her hair when she dresses up, has a pair of booties that will never make sense no matter how many times tried on, someone who is terrified equally by the likes of mixing prints and late night bacon-wrapped street dogs, know that although my life is in many ways happy this is my ridiculous, inescapable truth.

Know this, and perhaps if the moment arises smile as you walk by.

Feature Image Credit: My Less Serious Life

Image Credit: London NOA