Where Valentina Went

Part 1-Ballet

Part One-Ballet

I spun, I let myself get lost in the music. It was so easy, I could feel myself fly.

I let go of all the pain I felt as I raised my hands over my head and went into the adage position. What I felt when dancing was out of this world, I went bliss.

I felt oblivion.

Everything that I wanted, everything I needed, was in this dance. It was easy to lose yourself, it was easy to lose your pain. It was easy to loose feeling and thought and emotion in dance because all you thought about, all you felt was your feet moving, you hand soaring through the air and your body spinning in perfect symmetry to the music.

Dance was an art in which you could express who you were, how you felt and what you were saying by simply just spinning on your toes and pointing your ankle out perfectly. Every space, every movement and every pause affected how your audience was impacted by it, how they perceived who you were. To me, it was a form of identity. Dance was who I was; it was woven in my soul like DNA strands in my cells.

I finished with a pirouette and bowed deeply to the ground as a few people in the audience clapped.

"Excellent, Valentina! Brilliant, but... it was terrible."

"Please, Carter. Nothing I ever do can please you so I've stopped trying," I say to the director and he smiles.

"You were off beat by the sixteenth of a second, that can make or break a show," he says and I nod.

"I'll work on it Carter, but I'm beat. I need to get home, Kyle's waiting for me," Carter's rolls his eyes and then nods.

I never understood why none of them liked Kyle, they said he was a douchebag but I never saw it. He was so sweet to me, always bringing me flowers and stuff. I had met him two years ago when my best friend Carrie was visiting and we went bar hopping.

Of course Carrie kept comparing them to her now fiancé Alec and refused to flirt, just a bit.

A taken woman never makes a good wing woman.

"Valentina, wait up!" Carter catches up with me outside the theater. As I was leaving and placing a tight fun in my hair, with an outlandish bow on top.

Carter Stone was the struggling artist type. He had scruffy blonde hair and always had a bit of stubble on his chin. He took in the cold New York air and promptly zipped up his jacket, slipping a grey beanie over his head.

Even though he was the youngest and most sought after Broadway directors, he insisted on living in a tiny studio apartment above a bodega. It was a pretty cute apartment though. I had met Carter when he was interning at Julliard.

My first year in Berkley, I decided I hated it. Luckily I had the credentials to transfer over to Julliard and I moved from Boston to New York. It was the best decision I had ever made.

I met Carter when he was interning as a professors aid for a semester and spilled the History of French Ballet professor's coffee all over me.

We were practically best friends from then on.

He started directing in an inky dinky little theater when a talent scout spotted him and offered him a job as an assistant. I guess he just kept moving up the ladder from there because he's one of the best paid and sought after directors on Broadway. Before he was even thirty.

"Do you want a hot dog?" He asks me, gesturing to the stand and I nod.

"Alright, hold on. I think I have my wallet in here somewhere," I tell him but he shakes his head.