8. Imogen #3
My feet just move, carrying me down the dark sidewalk on their own while my mind runs and reruns the last half hour, my mother’s face, my father’s tears, the catch in my own voice on the word myself that I’ll have to feel properly later, when I have the room for it.
But as I walk, the understanding settles, piece by piece, rearranging the whole story I’ve been telling myself about the divorce and the marriage and the woman I’ve been.
This was never about punishing Hendrix.
I thought it was, at the start.
When I packed the bags and filed the papers, I told myself it was the book, the broadcast, the neglect, a man who chose his work over his wife one time too many. And it was that, partly. The hurt is real. The cold last year of us is not a thing I invented to justify leaving.
But underneath it, older and deeper, running all the way to the foundation, is a different reckoning. Hendrix was the last room I disappeared into.
My parents built the house. Brick by brick, one managed decision at a time, one acceptable want swapped for an unacceptable one, until the woman who walked down the aisle was already half gone and didn’t even know it.
The terrible symmetry of it isn’t lost on me, walking these familiar streets in the dark.
I married a man raised by a father who loved from a distance and called it providing, and I was raised by a mother who controlled from up close and called it love, and the two of us found each other in the middle and built a marriage out of the only blueprints we were ever handed.
Two people taught to disappear, disappearing together, and calling the silence peace.
I didn’t leave Hendrix because he wrote a book about another woman. I left because somewhere in the cold and the quiet and the endless waiting, I finally heard the question I’d been outrunning since I was young enough to be talked out of my own life.
Who am I, when nobody else is holding the pen?
I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.
And this time, nobody else gets a vote in the answer.
***
I’m rounding the corner toward my car when I stop.
It isn’t a decision. My feet just halt, mid-step, and I look up and realize where they’ve carried me.
The block I always avoid. The one I route around, the one I take the long way to miss, the one I’ve been steering myself away from for three years because walking past it opens a thing I’ve never been willing to sit with.
My old studio.
The lights are on.
Through the window I can see the room where I spent a thousand hours of my life.
The same barres I used to grip. The same mirrors I used to stare myself down in. The same floor I wore through three pairs of pointe shoes on in a single summer because I couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, because the dancing was the one thing that had ever been completely, uncomplicatedly mine.
There’s a class going. An evening one, little kids, six or seven years old, lined up along the barre in their leotards and their crooked buns and their total, fearless concentration.
They’re doing pliés, wobbly ones, knees drifting at angles that would have made my old teacher wince, and the effort of them radiates through the glass.
One girl at the front grips the barre with both hands, the tip of her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth, bending her knees with the seriousness of a person defusing a bomb.
Her feet are turned out at an angle that’s ambitious and entirely wrong, and I want to walk in there and set my hands on her small hips and fix it so badly that my palms actually ache.
I stand on the sidewalk, in the dark, and I watch them.
Taped to the window, curling at one corner, is a flyer. Plain white paper, the kind you run off at a copy shop, nothing to it at all.
[ INSTRUCTOR NEEDED. EVENING CLASSES. EXPERIENCE PREFERRED. ]
A phone number, an email.
A door.
A door I’d told myself was bricked shut, sealed over with three years of marriage and managed expectations and a life that never had room for the thing I loved most. A door I stopped looking at because looking at it hurt worse than pretending it wasn’t there.
But here it is. Standing quietly open.
The girl at the barre loses her balance, wobbles, catches herself on the wood, and drops right back into the plié, tongue out, knees bending, her whole small body given over to the work of becoming a thing she can’t name yet but already feels in her bones.
I stand there and I feel it.
The ache. The old, specific, bone-deep ache of a woman looking at the life she was supposed to have through a lit window, understanding that it has been waiting for her the entire time she spent disappearing.
My phone is in my hand before I’ve decided to reach for it. I don’t take a picture of the flyer. I don’t need to. The number is already burned into me, committed to memory by a part of my brain that has been waiting years for exactly this.
I get in the car. I drive back to the small borrowed rooms with the sagging couch and the creaky bed and the window that won’t quite close.
But the number stays with me, so does the ache.
After a long time, the ache doesn’t feel like grief.
It feels like my new beginning.