The Girl Who Will Not Die

We're thirteen, sprawled on Lizzie's unmade bed, shoulders touching.

She’s going on about this girl, Tove Ditlevsen, and her poem, ‘There Lives a Young Girl’.

She recites it like a prayer.

There lives a young girl in me who will not die,
she is no longer me, and I no longer her,
but she stares back when I look in the mirror,
searching for something she hopes to recover.

“What do you think she means?” Lizzie wants to know.

Classical music drifts up from downstairs, along with the sound of ice cubes clinking against glass.

Etched in Bone

Scientists say we inherit more than just eye color and bone structure from our parents.

We inherit their traumas, their fears, their addictions - coded into our DNA like time bombs. Like choreography we're destined to perform.

There is no one else in the world she can ask:
Where are the earnest smiles, the carefree dances?
Where are my dreams and the joy of twenty?
Tell me, have you made the most of my chances?

Below us, a scratched-out Tchaikovsky record skips, repeating the same four notes. Again. Again. Again. Again…

Lizzie springs to her feet in perfect grand plié: Up! Down. Up! Down. Up! Down. Up! she goes.

Movements, delicate and explosive, pretty and precise. Dancing in time to a broken record, on a broken player, for broken people.

Breaking Free

Some say free will is an illusion - that our choices are made long before we’re formed, written in our cells by ancestors we never met, by hurts we never felt.

But if that's true, why this constant battle between our best intentions vs. what we do anyway? Between who we want to be vs. who we are, despite our deepest desires to be something more?

‘Your dreams were flimsy, child, and doomed to fail,
your innocence ruined by the truth you were told –
your budding hopes fell to the ground
the night reality invaded your soul.

"My father left before I could walk," Lizzie told me once, balanced in third arabesque.

We were following the train tracks home after school. Me, taking long strides to hit every timber, while she strode alongside on a single rail.

"I guess some people are just born knowing what they want. What they don’t." Her eyes, fixed on some imaginary horizon.

Ballet seemed so hard, so brutal - bloody toes and twisted ankles. I watch her practice until midnight, wonder why she does it.

Her mom was a dancer. A lifetime ago. Before she decided vodka felt better than toe shoes.

‘You had a girl’s dream of a husband and baby,
and you got what you wanted but were still alone,
so you remained in childhood’s wondrous land,
while I am left roaming a world of stone.

Breaking Form

They say addiction runs in families like eye color or the shape of your nose.

But what about the other things we inherit?

Like the way Lizzie quickly mapped two exits from every room she entered. How she carried her dance bag everywhere, always, even on days she didn’t have class.

There's no improvisation in ballet. Every movement measured, prescribed, precise.

Maybe that's why Lizzie loved it, the one place chaos couldn't touch her, where she knew exactly what to do.

Reflections

Her mother's old dance photos hang on the wall, yellowed and curling at the edges.

Three generations of women stand at the barre: grandmother, mother, daughter—each one's spine a little more bent, each smile a little more hollow.

I should have seen it coming. Her genetics, the inevitable story written on her soul.

‘It is by your sheer strength you have not died,
but live on somewhere as a faint likeness,
though I have sold your dreams for a roof and bread
and brought you pain I mistook for happiness.

Some nights, on her rooftop beneath the stars, Lizzie traces the veins in my forearm like a road map, sheet music, or choreography she's trying to learn.

Her fingers avoiding the space between things - between want and need, between control and surrender, between who she was and who she was becoming.

Escape Velocity

There's a speed at which objects break free from gravity's pull. A precise calculation of mass, velocity, and distance.

Her mother tried AA and antidepressants. Her grandmother tried exorcism and electroshock. Lizzie tried heroin and perfect form.

I tried watching. As if bearing witness could somehow change reality.

‘And my only salvation is feeling your voice
as a surge in my heart’s languid beat –
you are my defence, my unrest and deepest comfort,
constant and true through time’s fickle retreat.’

Breaking Down

Tove Ditlevsen published eleven books of poetry, seven novels, and four collections of short stories in her lifetime. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages.

Gift [Dependency], one of her final books, chronicles her addiction to opioids, a dependency encouraged by her third husband, a physician.

Tove wrote ‘There Lives a Young Girl’ in 1938 when she was only 21 years old. She overdosed on sleeping pills in 1976 at the age of fifty-eight.

Lizzie used a needle at nineteen.

And that young girl who wouldn't die?

She's still here, in my blackened heart, crystal clear in my muddled mind, without the track marks and hollow eyes. Still searching. Still hoping.

Still believing she can dance her way out of this god-forsaken mess.

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