The Dancer

Once upon a time on a planet that was mostly harmless and sometimes blue, there was a dancer. She had been a dancer since a tiny sprout with limbs that fluttered in the breeze of life and love. Her feet had learned the alphabet of steps before her mouth mastered the language of her people. She lived, oh how she lived, every moment of her life in the moment, celebrating her body and the poetry of movement that was her birthright and her voice.
 
Her dance was a prayer, an act of love, a rebellion against the stillness of death that loomed like a shadow over portions of the world. She twirled and leapt, a human kaleidoscope of emotion and beauty.  
 
As she left childhood behind, her body grew in stature and grace. Finally, she met a man worthy of her love. With him she became a comet, a celestial body of light, burning so fiercely that time seemed to stand still, if only for the span of a few heartbeats.
 
But comets are not meant to last forever. Nor is peace.  
 
What was lost to the world in that moment when a young soldier with orders and a gun and a heart that was perhaps not as cold as he wished, followed the commands given to him? There was no music when she fell, no gasp of awe from an enraptured audience. The awkwardness of her falling wasn’t that of a dancer but simply another victim of war.  
 
The soldier, following orders, had not seen the dancer, only the target. He did not know that when he pulled the trigger, he unraveled art that had been woven since she first heard the whisper of music inside her mother’s womb. He did not know that he silenced a symphony of motion made from years of sweat and dreams. Bullets have no respect for beauty, or passion, or what might have been.
 
And so, the comet fell, not with the grace of a pirouette but with the flailing of limbs severed from their spirit center. Her core gave way and folded to the earth, leaving her legs sprawled in ways that would have made her blush when she was as a child.  
 
"And so it goes.”