June Kitahara and Kana Motojima
July, 2025
July, 2025
Again, Again
She was not played with enough as a child. It is an inevitable symptom of being an only child and a daughter of an older, single parent. Her mother chose not to sit beside her daughter as the young girl shoved the Polly Pocket into her Lego home, or placed her stuffed bears tidily against the wall. “Look!” the daughter would shout. Her mother would do her due diligence: glance, nod, smile, and turn back around.
As a young girl, the daughter was only watched by her mother when she danced. Her most impressive trick was curling her toes and standing on the whitened knuckles for long periods. Balancing until her toes went numb, she waddled around the house, crunching her feet across the floors. Her mother was so impressed that the daughter never allowed her toes to unfurl. “It doesn’t hurt?” her mother asked. The daughter would shake her head and flaunt as she moved from the carpeted floors to the marbled tiles.
The daughter moved on to performing the grand gesture of a half-done pirouette. For hours, she watched the elegant ballerinas in Swan Lake, or the momentous joy of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Through these women, the daughter learned how to spin. Throwing her arms and slicing the air with her legs, she felt the momentum of the spin push out a laugh. The daughter had discovered a physical formula for producing joy, an act that forced the laughter out of her. She began to jump into arabesques, mimicking fouettes, and tumbling onto the wooden floors. The laughter would not stop, and her mother was filled with such joy at the sight. “Again! Again!” her mother applauded. The daughter soon abandoned the childish toys, finding that dance called for greater attention. She preferred the way her mother’s face lit up when she pranced around the living room or patted her tutu as if it were an obedient dog.
Her mother’s friends often came over for dinner, and an essential part of the evening was the daughter’s dancing. The adults smiled over their wine glasses, as they watched the daughter turn and leap. The daughter’s eyes never left the guests’ faces. She would look for that sharp breath that happens before a gasp. She knew that the exact timing of her pirouette would either conjure wonder or laughter. Depending on the guest, she would either land the pirouette with perfect precision or fake a tumble.
She always ended the performance with her toes curled under. The bones of her feet jutted over and stabbed the air like darts. She would waddle from the carpeted floors to the marbled tiles, seemingly unaffected by the strain. To this day, her mother thinks that this trick does not hurt her daughter. Rather, her mother believes it is a mysterious genetic trait that the daughter received from a distant relative. “A natural-born ballerina,” the mother calls her daughter.