Blue Dancers

When I was a child, I wanted to be a ballerina. I never trained ballet, instead I would dance around the house to Tschaikowsky's 'Swan Lake'. My grandparents lived in the same building as we did, just one floor bellow and almost every night, I'd come down to their apartment to teach my grandfather how to do ballet. I was a young, but strict teacher and my student had to put on black tights and imitate my every move. I remember feeling frustrated, because my 70 year-old grandfather wasn't particularly good in ballet. However, later on it would become clear to me that I wasn't either. Two years ago, my grandfather was in a car accident. A month later we discovered he had a brain hemorrhage. He was in the hospital and I only visited once, but I wrote letters to him into my diary and cried, firmly believing he wasn't going to make it. Luckily, my fortune telling skills are terrible and my grandfather didn't only live, but recovered completely. Every day, from noon until 2 pm, he meets up for coffee with his friends in Hotel Europa. He joggs. He flirts with saleswomen in stores. One could say he's as well as ever. But I found one of the letters I wrote on the day he was supposed to have surgery, two years ago. It just says: Thank you for dancing.