Dagger Series #7: Unbalanced

Synopsis

SYNOPSIS

I remember one particular memory. I was four, and I had just come from my ballet practice. I was in an amusement park, and I was riding on the carousel. But I remember a man being with me, and I just know that he was my father. I remember that I was having the best time, but his cellphone rang, and at the next moment, my mom was there, taking me away.

When I turned five, that same man gave me a dollhouse. One that looks like a castle. I fell in love with it instantly. But the next day I saw it in the thrash, broken into pieces.

When I turned six, the man gave me a necklace with a crown design. It was so beautiful. My mother ripped it off my neck, and she started screaming at him. She drove him away, and all I could do was watch.

I thought that was the last time I would ever see him. But when I was seven, he returned. This time, there are no gifts, no smiles... nothing. It was like he couldn't see me and that I didn't matter.

I heard them fighting. I heard him tell my mother that he would no longer give us anything for what she had done. That he never wants to see us again, or there will be repercussions.

That was also the time that I found out the truth.

The truth about my mother and the man who calls me Millicent and whose name I never got to know. I found out the reason why she keeps taking away the things that I want to have. The things that I wish to have.

It turns out it was just right that she did because it seems like I'm the one bearing the punishment for her mistakes. Everything that I want to keep is being taken away from me because we are also taking things from other people.

I realized why my mother hated his gifts. Why she's so angry every time he gives her money. She hated that he was only with us to visit. What she really wanted was for him to choose us. She wanted to take him from his family. His real family.

From then on, I stopped asking for him. I stopped expecting to see him. I don't deserve to have him because he doesn't belong to us.

Control.

It's something that I keep hearing from my ballet instructors and a word that my mother always uses on me. That day, as I watched my father's car leave, it became my life. To not fail, I need to have control over everything. The way I stand tall, the way I act, the way I speak, everything that is me revolves around it.

But most especially, I need control so I won't get hurt again. So that I won't end up being like my mother. I will not be made into a fool. I will not fall in love. Especially not with a man who is as weak and unfaithful as my father. Or not with anyone at all because in the end, they will all turn like him anyway.

I stopped wanting. I stopped needing. All that's left for me is ballet. I put everything that I am into it because without it, I am nothing.

It wasn't a surprise that, at such a young age, I was already making names for myself in the world of ballet. And at seventeen, me, Tiara Millicent Silvano, became not just one of the youngest prima ballerinas in the world but also one of the most famous and influential ballerinas.

I was at the top. There was no place to go. There was nothing more to reach for. Control, which had been the power I yielded, became the sword pointed at my neck. I thought that at the top, the light that would beam on me would warm me. Instead, it was cold and lonely.

I was exhausted, ragged to the bones. And yet, how the world sees me hasn't changed. They see nothing but a beautiful doll that exists to be admired. Like a wind-up music box with a ballerina that doesn't stop dancing.

Until it was him that was watching me. Domino Dawson.

The way he looks at me tells me that he doesn't see me the way others do. He doesn't look at me like an object of fascination, but rather, it feels like he couldn't care any less if I broke my knees and stopped dancing. It's like he doesn't care if I'm out of rhythm, if I don't smile and wave, or if I act a little unhinged and unbalanced.

He doesn't see my pretense of perfection; what he sees is the brokenness, the cracks, and the edges... the real me that even I can't recognize at times. But most of all, his eyes don't just hold admiration. Instead, I could feel the weight of ownership in his gaze, making me feel something that I had never felt before: the feeling of belongingness.

In my life, where I feel like I am balancing on a thin rope, it will be him that will cause me to fall. Even if something tells me that he would catch me... there's a part of me that doesn't know if I could trust myself to him.

He scares me. Not because I know that there's no way that he wouldn't take control.

What I was fearing was myself wanting to surrender it all to him.