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EP314: Movement : Escape Pod - 0 views

escapepod.org/ep314

I've Read Speculative Fiction Favorites Audio Podcast

shared by Sunny Jackson on 21 Nov 11 - Cached
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  • Words are such fleeting, indefinite things.  They slip through the spaces between my thoughts and are lost.
  • Other people do not see the shoes the same way I do.  They see only the faded satin, battered so much that it has grown threadbare, and the rough wood of the toe box where it juts through the gaps.  They do not see how the worn leather has matched itself to the shape of my foot.  They do not know what it is like to dance in shoes that feel like a part of your body.
  • I begin to warm my muscles, keenly aware of the paths the shadows trace along the walls as sunset fades into darkness.  When I have finished the last of my pliésand jetés, stars glimmer through the colored glass of the windows, dizzying me with their progress.  I am hurtling through space, part of a solar system flung towards the outer rim of its galaxy.  It is difficult to breathe.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Often, when the flow of time becomes too strong, I crawl into the dark space beneath my bed and run my fingers along the rough stones and jagged glass fragments that I have collected there.  But today the pointe shoes are connecting me to the ground.
  • Time stretches and spins like molasses, pulling me in all directions at once.  I am like the silence between one movement of music and the next, like a water droplet trapped halfway down a waterfall that stands frozen in time. Forces press against me, churning, swirling, roaring with the sound of reality changing.  I hear my heart beating in the empty chamber.  I wonder if this is how Daniel Tammet felt when he contemplated infinity.
  • Finally I find it; the pattern in the chaos.  It is not music, precisely, but it is very like it.  It unlocks the terror that has tightened my muscles and I am no longer a mote in a hurricane.  I am the hurricane itself.  My feet stir up dust along the floor.  My body moves in concordance with my will.  There are no words here.  There is only me and the motion, whirling in patterns as complex as they are inconstant.
  • When my muscles lose their strength I will relinquish the illusion of control and return to being yet another particle in the rushing chaos of the universe, a spectator to my own existence.  But for now I am aware of nothing except my own movement and the energy rushing through my blood vessels.  Were it not for physical limitations, I would keep dancing forever.
  • “No new shoes,”I say.  “I couldn’t dance the same in new shoes.”
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