Written by Ella Donoghue
Photography by Anna Brody
I began dancing when I was three.
Monday nights, ballet.
In the cold and stuffy backroom of some sad strip mall office,
where the ceilings were tall
and the winter sky was always sleepy and dark,
like a romantic painting
framed by French doors in the back.
With the other little girls
wrapped in pink tights and leg warmers and leotards,
I tumbled and turned,
distracted by people
shuffling by the back doors.
I began therapy sessions when I was sixteen.
Monday nights, on the second floor of some stuffy strip mall office.
Entering a coffee shop below
through its back doors made of glass,
I stepped backward into time.
And I recognized it all:
the doorframe,
the view outside the windows;
they were something from a past life,
except perhaps with lower ceilings.
So once a week, I schedule a coffee date with my three-year-old self.
Marked on my calendar, right below therapy, I have a meeting with a memory.
And she twirls in her Target tutu
and she leaps over the floorboards,
which have since been covered by plastic wood panels,
and her classical music plays somewhere
underneath the pop rhythms of the coffee shop.
I try to hum along,
try to feel her beneath my skin.
As I sip on my coffee we both daydream, distracted,
as we stare out the French doors in the back.
My sky melts into hers.
I wonder if three-year-old me can smell the coffee beans, 
if she can feel my eyes tracing her movement
in the floor to ceiling mirror that no longer stands,
if she is performing for me.
She only ever saw me in her dreams,
now I only see her in mine.
Except on Monday afternoons,
when her ghost dances through me,
I silently sip my shaken espresso,
and we go home to different houses.
