62 degrees

This is the temperature of the stage when the lights are dim, but not quite off. The dimly lit stage is brisk during the dress rehearsal warm up, but it is a blessing that allows me to breathe before the lights bear their warmth.

I can feel the valleys carved into the soles of my pointe shoes as I glide over the supple wooden stage. I breathe in the lingering smell of perfume and hairspray and dust, gathering my nerve for the next steps to come. It is simple. Not the dance really, but the actual movement. I know all the steps without having to think and I preform them with ease; finding comfort, and boredom, in routine.

The floor springboards me as I leave it, ushering my body into a graceful arch. The air slides about my legs, brushing it in such a way that the hairs stand on edge. I am elated to be in the air. Flying, if only for a moment, free of the choreography and what it demands me to be.

Hands clench my legs mid-air, grasping savagely at the tender part of my knee. I can feel myself slipping. I am falling.

Crashing.

65 degrees

The doctor’s office is too cold to be sitting in my underwear. But perhaps it is my broken heart that causes me to be so frigid.

68 degrees

I am cautious of this floor. The fencing floor is a shellacked wooden surface, so perfectly varnished that any dancer in their right mind would have visions of falling just by looking at it.

The floor is a beautifully frightening prospect. It is so similar to the one I left, yet so different that the idea of comparison is insulting. Where the stage was chilling and desolate, this floor seems inviting. Where the stage was a beautifully mastered painting, this floor is a blank canvas- desperate to be painted.

I spend four years on that glossy wooden floor, mending my broken heart and falling in love all over again with fencing.

72 degrees

It’s about room temperature in the gymnasium. I can feel the tension and excitement in the air and all around me. Even through my padded knickers and dense jacket, the slight breeze causes the hair on my legs raise in anticipation. I can feel the chill of excitement climbing my spine, reverberating at the base of my skull until the hair on the back of my neck stands at attention.

My number is called. I take the cord from the girl hooking down from the strip. Unlike the fencing club floor, the strip is isolated and unsettling. It emphasizes how truly alone my opponent and I are.

It is like the day on the stage, yet also like the variances between the floors: similar, yet painfully different. I feel the adrenaline pumping through me, turning me into a live wire. With my mind and stomach whirring like a blender, I have never felt more at ease.

The choreography that I once followed to a nanometer of precision is now my own to create. I move and bounce and launch into a lunge. I am elated to be free of the floor beneath my front foot. This time, I am not falling.

98.6 degrees

My average body temperature.

The body with the left ankle too weak to ever support going en pointe, the discoloration on the right arm from all the bruises fencing has left, and the spill of brunette hair that has a permanent crimp from where the numerous ponytail holders have been is the figure I call my own. This is the temperature of the figure that surprises me with ability and potential. It is the temperature of the body I have the honor of commanding and the way by which I have learned strength, precision, and freedom.