Dating : Lattice

A story

Ice crystals glistening resplendent canary hues reflecting the street lamps outside gently spotted Yasmine’s crossed legs. She was seated on a yoga mat so near to the glass curtain wall that the plaster on each side which met the glass was outside her field of vision. She felt suspended in air or even like a buddha levitating, seated in the soft center of a lotus flower. Toto, her corgi, brushed his long body against one of her legs, peeling the curtain back from her wintry reverie. His hair, she realized, was everywhere. She thought about the lengths she and the others had gone to over the past summer to continue to keep the studio immaculate. It was one way it seemed to save face and to convince the public, the other local businesses, and herself that their “new normal” was normal enough. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” she said quietly out loud. Now they had just let the hair pile up like pocket-sized piles of rubble: a miniature portent of what the remodeling operation of her studio might look like in a few months.

She was the only one home tonight; It was already ten-thirty p.m. For the past week or so she had been staying several hours after closing. She supposed it was a part of her mourning process. Yasmine had experienced considerable loss in her life but never had she lost something so serious that she perceived as being in her control. Friends’ chronic illnesses, her first car, a chic but understated black Saab (a car she would love now if they were still in business) that had been totaled in a rear-end collision, her childhood dream, the puppy before Toto, and the death of her mother were all cards that she had yielded to the game of life. This loss, though, was of a different quality than the rest.

Growing up, Yasmine had danced ballet. She had sacrificed thousands of hours a year to the grueling sport. Her nature had mysteriously led her to the practice, and the practice preyed on her nature: control, precision, perfection. It is the unique blessing of the young to discern the potential for perfection in themselves and the world around them, Yasmine thought now. Bloody lambswool was never enough to barricade Yasmine from extending her rehearsal to get her series of pirouettes right, but snapping hip syndrome was. In her first year dancing as corps de ballet with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, she noticed one morning during warm-ups that when rotating her hip out to the side and then center, at certain intervals, the crease of her groin would release a crackle violent as a frightened snapping turtle. She ignored it. Later that practice, when levering herself into an arabesque penchée, there it was again. The male partner she was dancing with heard it too. He had suggested that she sit out for a while, try icing it, or even going to the…trainer.

Retreating to the trainer felt like a double-edged sword for most of the dancers as it was not only a sign of weakness to the artistic director and choreographer but thus, post hoc ergo propter hoc, an indication to the dancer themself that the injury could be grim. That was precisely the reason Yasmine forewent her partner’s counsel, continued on dancing despite her snapping hip, all in a grand effort to improvise control. As fate would have it, during a performance the following spring, her hip gave out in the midst of a jeté, and she fell face forwards onto the stage.

Scenes of displaced potential: lives that were once hers, came back to Yasmine in shards, some opaque and some mysteriously clear. She was now lying on the yoga mat in a savasana pose. She felt at once a slight reverberation in her body form as if she had been placed in a simulation, some sort of computer game in which she was the main player, forced to study that determinant night of her last performance again. So many years later, and living out a life with new dreams and ambitions, Yasmine was able to see clearly through the glass shards of her time as a ballerina. The emotions surrounding this first major tragedy were precise and unmixed like the transparent glass pieces of the memory.

A quality of sadness still pervaded the remembrance, but it was a sadness that was comprehensible to her; The mistakes she had made leading up to that great slip, if any, were ones of persistence, not negligence. She had exerted as much dominion over her injury as was humanly possible, and so this simulation of past events was bitter but not piercing. It is when emotions are crossbred that they poke at you, she mused.

Yasmine rolled onto her right side and slowly shifted her torso upright. She decided it was time to close up shop. She was hungry and wanted to grab dinner before all the restaurants would be closed. She rolled up her mat as if she were rolling up a scroll that contained the history of events of Ebb and Flow. Checking the bottoms of her bare feet, she noticed how dusty they were. After gathering her things and putting on her oversized and wool-lined pale pink parka, she paused and decided she would dust quickly before heading out.

Grabbing the duster from the supply closet, she made quick, deliberate brush strokes along the studio’s countertops. The duster split its feathers down a picture frame on her desk. It was a photo of her and her best friend in a surfing lesson. They both looked so vibrant with their freshly-tanned faces and bubble-like bottoms, no more than fifteen there. The photo was such a stark opposition to the sapped look that graced their countenances these days. Time had not yet taken away their chubby cheeks, a feature they both shared, but it had drained some of the life fluid that coursed through their youthful plumpness, especially Anna’s.

Anna had been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when they were both in high school, like a rich maple tree that is tapped when too young. It was a chronic condition that made her severely ill for prolonged periods of time, off and on. Yasmine recalled visiting her, a few years out of college, and at first barely recognizing the semblance of the indefatigable ball of fire that Anna had once been. As the years passed since this visit that left Yasmine in shock, Anna became more frequently unwell on her visits than well. Before the global pandemic hit at the start of this year, Yasmine had gone for a visit to see Anna. They had been dining out at an Italian restaurant, and Anna was so weak that while slurping a spaghetti noodle, her pursed lips had not even the strength to hold the noodle in place, that it slipped through her mouth and back into the bowl. It was after this episode that Yasmine began constructing an elaborate system of defense to try and make sense of Anna’s poor health.

Yasmine let the image exit her consciousness and, with that, put the duster away, and decided that now it was really time to go. The Mexican place around the corner was still serving its late-night burritos from a tiny take-out window on its alley side. The establishment had placed a delicate set of string lights along the brick-sided wall so that half of the alley was lit and, that way, if you were starving and alone out there at night trying to wave down an employee as rapidly as possible, at least you had a slight measure of security in your ravenous state. Yasmine craned her neck around, and thankfully, there was one person at the window already. There would be more shivering but less paranoia.

Before long, Yasmine had her fresh burrito tucked safely into its artfully folded aluminum foil wrap, which she then tucked safely into her canvas bag. She set out to walk the six chilly blocks to her one-bedroom apartment. The frosty winds made the appearance of Anna from the picture frame at work resurface in her mind, as biting currents often have the habit of prodding at mental discomforts. Yasmine resisted the manifestation of Anna’s undoing by reasoning that the physical loss had no effect on their intimacy. The loss of her friend wasn’t absolute; The bond they shared and the quality of their love remained completely intact. Yasmine justified the misfortunate predicament in this way: she would keep showing up for their friendship with the same amount of love, if not more. She would not allow the external qualities of their relationship to alter the fertile and full dance of the internal life of the friendship. In this way, she thought, there could be no real decay.

The door of her apartment was retained deep behind sets of towering arborvitae. She felt grateful to be able to retreat here from the acute embarrassment she was feeling surrounding her failing business. On some days it felt as if the studio itself was incarnate with the spirit of its constituent members, as well as its neighboring likenesses, the other local businesses, and she was made to bear the emotional weight of all these living disappointments. Yasmine walked peacefully through the shrouded path to her doorstep and waved her apartment key fob in front of the key reader as if she were preparing herself to pass through a portal from a complicated web of duty and encumbrance into her little, insignificant singular actuality.

When she passed the threshold of her apartment door she let out a sigh of relief that seemed to have been welling up inside of her since she left for the studio earlier that day. She had mostly been managing the online system and the queue of online classes from the privacy of her home, but today had an urgent meeting with her agent to discuss the studio lease. She decided to call her friend who lived a few floors up.

“Hey, Steve? How are you?”

“Hey! Good…good. I’m just finishing up grading some papers.” Steve was a Modern European history professor at a local university.

“Any chance you want to join me for a cup of tea afterward? I can make us matcha with the teeny brush and bowl you like.”

“That sounds lovely, Yaz. Remember, I like mine creamy.” Yasmine could almost feel the exaggerated wink that he had a habit of making at this last word through the phone.

Yasmine went to the bathroom to freshen up and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She noticed something unfamiliar in her reflection. In this new state of frailty, she looked not broken down but innocent. The rawness of her image communicated an inculpability to her that her mind was not yet made aware of as if her blamelessness could have been apparent to anyone that really looked at her. She splashed her face with water and watched as the lukewarm droplets fell from crown to chin and cleansed her from her guilt, seeming to say to her in their ornate gesture: “wash it away.”

She walked into the kitchen and opened the cabinet that held the container of matcha. She made a mean matcha, and she knew it; Her best was always enough when it came to making matcha. The tea leaf powder sifted into the small bowl ridding itself of the grains that would cause friction. After, Yasmine was left with a soft heap of powder so light and fine that if you blew on it, it would whirl tranquilly away to another place. She then took the carafe and slowly poured the hot water into the bowl, using the brush to dissolve the powder into the water, the powder yielding itself to the metamorphosing effect of the water, and to the loss of its original form.

The doorbell rang.

“Season’s Greetings,” Steve said in his sweet, sarcastic way. Yasmine leaned in to give him a welcoming hug.

“You’re in luck; Your matcha came out extra creamy,” she said.

She gestured to him to come in and sit down on her plush, jade sofa. He sat down with a “plunk” and sighed heartily.

“I love this couch,” he said, “It just fits me perfectly.” Yasmine giggled and went to retrieve the cups of matcha.

While setting them on the coffee table, she said, “My agent wouldn’t hold out for another few months. He said I was in too deep and that he couldn’t make another concession.”

Steve looked at her and the tears that she was holding back. “You did the best you could, Yaz; you persisted until the end.”

Yasmine sat down and reclined next to Steve in degrees, like one of the snowflakes outside, falling gently to the ground.

“The studio was not only a part of me, it was my creation. It consumed me,” she revealed.

After a few pensive moments, Steve said,“Ebb and Flow was not you. And what you created with it, the community, the knowledge you spread, will linger long after it is gone.

“But my best wasn’t enough, Steve!” she proclaimed with a deep-set grievance that she felt far more than the words themselves meant. A few tears forced themselves out and fell down her cheek.

Steve wiped the tears with his thumb and paused to take the first sip from his cup of matcha.

“Your best is always enough, Yaz, and your best never ends. Look around you and observe the world, just as you teach it. Only then will you find your next beginning in the trove of things waiting to be transfigured.”

A lightbulb went off from within Yasmine that illuminated the lattice-work of loss in her heart. His words helped to comb through the myriad threads of grief and untangled them into something that felt like relief.