It Girl
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The Poem
It Girl
She escaped the war by dancing.This is the part they don’t put on the poster —the girl in the occupied Netherlands,the hunger winter,the specific cold of a childhoodthat required escapeand found it in the body’s ability to move through spacein a way the war could not follow.
The dance as the door.The art as the refuge —before it was the career,before it was the icon,before it was the little black dressand the image that became the characterthat became the thing everyone thinks they knowwhen they say her name.
The dance as the door
They made her into a character.This is what we do with the beautiful ones —we take the surface, call it the whole story,put it on the tote bag, the coffee mug,the thing you buy when you want to own a pieceof something you cannot actually own.
The humanitarian who spent her later yearsholding children in the countriesnobody was shooting a movie in —that part doesn’t fit on the mug.
She was not Bardot. She was not Welch.She was the other thing —the sign of the times that pointed somewhere quieter, more true,the talent that didn’t chase the famebut stumbled into it on the way to the dance studio,the girl who just wanted to move through spacein a way the war couldn’t followand found the world watchingand decided to show them something worth seeing.
I know this from the inside.Art was my refuge too.Not from war — from divorce, from pain,from the loneliness that arriveswhen the life you built with someonebecomes the life you inhabit aloneand the alone is very loud.
The only thing louder was the making.The image. The work.The piece I could stand in front of and sayI made this from what broke me —and mean it as triumph.
She was beloved.The right word. The true word.The one that contains both the poster and the hunger winter,both the dress and the dance,both the character they made of herand the woman she actually was.
She was beloved
We are all more than the character.The famous ones and the unknown onesand the ones who made art in their living roomsafter the divorce in the loneliness —all of us with a hunger winter somewhere in our history,the thing we danced through to get here.
The telling is the surviving.The surviving is the point.The point was never the poster.
She escaped the war by dancing.I escaped by making.The door is the same door.The refuge is the same refuge.
A person who found the one true thingthat held them when everything else was falling —and stayed in it, and let it save them,and made something from what remainedthat outlasted the pain.
She was beloved.
She earned it —
not by being the character
but by dancing through the war to get here
and never stopping.