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Taryn
ON THE WAY BACK FROM the hospital, I get off the bus two stops early and walk through the inky night. As I knew they would, my footsteps take me to the graveyard next to St. John’s Church. The wooden gate creaks and squeaks as I swing it open. The first time I came here, that sound made me jump. Now, it feels like a welcome.
The whole place feels like a welcome, a sanctuary. For a long time, I’ve felt more at home out here than in the dorm rooms. Because, here, I am free as I dance along the gravel paths, letting the ambience of the graveyard fill me as I create a connection deeper to the world, to my body, feel the beautiful power of ballet. And it’s always like this as I dance for Helena.
Every time I think of her, I try to make it positive. Recalling a good memory. A time when we made each other laugh. Or when we were little and baking cupcakes together, sticking sticky fingers into the bowl of mixture.
I almost can’t believe I’ve lived so long without her. Nearly six years now. It both feels like a lifetime, and it doesn’t. It feels like everything and nothing and all that’s in between as I think of life before the accident and life after.
The accident I caused.
Darkness creeps into me, and it’s trying to stir me up, disrupt my dancing, but when I’m out here, I’m dancing for Helena. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t the graveyard she’s buried in, because I feel like, spiritually, all graveyards are connected. That all souls are present in every single one, and somewhere, Helena is watching me, feeling this dance. This is for her, this routine, just like it always is out here. Well, for her and me, a way for me to connect to the half of me that I lost. And this is all Helena has now, the only way to live through me, to still dance, so that’s why I don’t allow the darkness and my guilt to destabilize me now. That can—and will—wait for other times, because this is something I’m doing for her.
I dance around the graveyard, losing myself in the feelings, the memories. My sister is everything. Together, we are everything. Identical sisters. And sometimes when I dance by gravestones, I feel like I am becoming her—weightless, and free, and haunting. Or maybe I was her all along. Maybe I’m Helena and Taryn is dead, gone, looking down on all this, and I’m living through myself, both of us at once, dead and alive and everything in between.
Ghosts are a silent audience, and I do my best dances out here, for her, for us, when there’s no pressure. Teddy got that. And I feel it now, feel it getting stronger and stronger as I near the end of my routine. Dancing in the dark, for ghosts, is exhilarating, mesmerizing because it’s all about the beauty of movement, about communicating emotions, and creating connections.
And ghosts never comment.
Except this time, they do.
Because the moment I finish my combinations, someone claps a long, slow clap.