Dancing Girl
by Kelly Thompson
Hulki Okan Tabak, Untitled, digital photograph. 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Dancing Girl
Kelly Thompson | July 2026 | Issue 53
ESSAY
The Excelsior, a long narrow bar smack dab in the middle of downtown Colorado Springs, was a favorite haunt in my twenties. A single mom of two toddlers, you could find me there on Friday nights, or Saturdays. One particular night, though the memory is in shards, has never left me.
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The Excelsior’s dark interior welcomes me and I most likely order a shot with beer as a chaser. Or maybe I stick to beer that night. I must have. Because I didn’t black out and shots almost always meant black outs. It would have been Heineken. In the green bottle, the white letters. A red star. My mouth on the smooth glass lip of it, the liquid slightly bitter in a good way. I would have sucked a Heineken down. Reached for another.
Somehow I make my way to the back room with the pool table, and light. Then I can see who I am talking to. The woman follows me. She seems so friendly!
She is beautiful. Dark curls frame her face, the night moving in her eyes. Her eyes, an exotic mix of iris and springtime, meet mine and the night finds us laughing. A friend! Somehow, I’ve come to this night alone, and I wonder now, did I do that often? Go drinking alone? Where were my children?
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When I was eight, in third grade — February it would have been — the teacher taught us about Groundhog Day, then told us to write what we had learned. I held a fat pencil in a steady hand and wrote, pressing the words onto the page hard. The Dancing Groundhog was the story of a little groundhog girl whose dream was to become a dancer, though dancing was forbidden by her groundhog parents and the groundhog god. The Dancing Groundhog danced anyway, outside in the snow, above the den, danced with her shadow, danced like a star, and a Hollywood agent discovered her. I was still writing when the bell for recess rang and the teacher let me stay in to keep writing. I wrote eleven pages.
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In the poolroom at the Excelsior, the satisfying whack of balls hitting each other on the pool table, the smack, the clack. Hot guys with tight butts in Calvin Klein jeans lean over the green felt arena, pool sticks like arms or legs, part of their bodies. Cigarettes hang out of their mouths. Everyone smokes indoors.
I open a fresh pack of Marlboros, the red package, give my newfound friend a cigarette, put one in my own mouth. She lights both of them with a classy gold lighter, brings her face close, the flame a sun flare between us.
Her teeth are perfect. Her mouth tinged purple. She reminds me of violets. Let’s call her Violet. You know I can’t remember her name.
Yes. I was twenty.
I’m wearing cords, tight, a salmon color. The way they feel on my hips, how they hug my crotch and my ass is hot, always my best feature. Something about being twenty and the way my blood is electric, like liquid lightning, pulsing through me. Something about the gap between my teeth and how I grin. How smooth my face is. There’s nothing except me, my new friend, and the greenness in my hand, the smoke and its vapor, men circling around the two of us like moons around planets. Nothing but me and this Violet, the twin soul I’ve found in the long dark rooms of the bar, and the way we gravitate to the back where the light is.
Twenty and life spills from me so hard I am cracked.
There’s a small corner where a solo musician plays her guitar and sings covers. She croons, “You’re a little touched you know, Angie baby.” Violet and I sway to the Helen Reddy tune. “Well, maybe,” we sing along and to each other.
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I was a chosen child. I was David facing Goliath. I had only to launch a pebble at the giant. But I had chosen hell instead of salvation.
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Some guy playing pool says, “Hey, let’s go dancing!” He knows the exact place to take us.
Violet hangs back, whispers, “let’s not.”
Oh yes, we have to go dancing. This is the night for dancing, I tell her. Doesn’t she see?
And that’s how we end up at another bar, where a band plays and there’s a dance floor. She’s sticking with me.
The pool playing guy has lots to say. But we’re not listening, neither of us, me or Violet.
We’ve locked eyes and I can’t believe this girl whose heart, like mine, can’t be cloistered. Her laugh strikes like a match, and mine ignites hers — a laugh that comes from deep in her guts and opens my heart until I am flying.
We end up on the dance floor and in those days, girls didn’t dance with each other. My god. Did we care? I had never cared less.
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My mother had wanted me for God. A sister worker, a handmaiden, her best girl given back to Jesus. I had already broken that. Failed her. What was one more thing I was not supposed to want?
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People in the bar gather to watch us. And we love it. Strobe lights beneath a disco ball spinning. Two girls flashing red blue purple yellow, hair streaming gold.
It had to be after closing time before we left. I don't remember the leaving but neither of us had a car and we ended up in a taxi — I must have given the driver the address to my friend Linda’s place, where I was staying in her attic. It's all magic, you know. The yellow cab and the pulsating night flying past outside the taxi windows, and I'm twenty. She is just as young. We are radiant. I see the night now, so many decades later, a wet blur smeared like paint across the cab windshield. All the colors.
And in the back of the taxi, Violet's arms and legs are twined around mine. Her breath comes so quickly it's like placing my face in the fire; how her cheeks burn — and the cab stops and it scares me.
"Can I come in?" I will never forget her eyes, my twin, and the need like a message from some other lifetime, some other country, an unremembered place, trying to reach me.
No, no, no, I say to all of her yeses.
And the way she says “Please,” and whispers how she will only sleep, nothing else, with me, if I will just let her come in.
“I can’t.” I tell her.
And I couldn’t.
Later, I lay alone in a curl of anguish, my arms wrapped around my naked body. My skin still held the shape of her—the phantom weight of her arms, her legs, the place on my neck where her breath had been. I had wanted her with my whole body, and yet I’d pushed her away. In the dark I still reached for her, still held on to her light and the colors she had left burning in the night.
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Not too long after, I remember I attended a church meeting. Not because of her or that night. I had closed my mind to any thoughts, really, numbed myself to my body’s truth, the lightning that struck cracks through me. I don’t know why I ended up there, back in my mother’s church, except I wanted to be what they’d told me I must be, and I didn’t know how to be anyone else.
At the meeting, all the humble godly people smiled so kindly. I felt nostalgic for childhood. If only I belonged.
But I could see it in their eyes. I didn’t belong, prodigal daughter or not. They knew, even if I didn’t.
It was all so familiar, the modest smiles of the saints, as they called themselves, the punishing slats of the wooden chair beneath me, the off-key singing of the hymns. Even the way the pages of the bibles smelled. Like vellum.
It stays with you.
Like the crush of violets.
Kelly Thompson is editor of The W(hole) and former editor of Voices on Addiction at The Rumpus. She writes the Substack There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was) and is completing her memoir, Losing My Religion: A Memoir of Rupture and Rapture.