Howl's Moving Castle

I listened, then listened again.  The melody was so haunting, so...iridescent.  It teased a part of my memory that I couldn't quite recall.  A childhood encounter long since tucked away in the corners of my dusty mind.  And it lingered gently, like the last flutters of butterfly-wing dreams.  It played in my brain, floating about my mind, peeking shyly behind cracked doors, ducking quickly into darkened corridors, and I could hear the memory it almost evoked laughing through a dimly lit hallway.  I could just...reach out...and grab it.  But not quite.  So I'll listen again and maybe this time, I'll be able to illuminate the memory that it so coyly teases me with from behind my mind's half-blind eye. 

And then..."The song is almost like a dance."  Yes it is.  That's exactly right.  A dance I remember from so long ago.  Balance, Soutenu, Echappe, Piroutte.  I remember now.  I remember being a small child just learning the steps and the song I had forever replayed in my mind to remind me how to perform them.  Balance, Soutenu, Echappe, Piroutte.  Even now I sing the steps in my head to the tune of this shy melody, or something similar to it, and I am reminded of the way those notes carried my tiny ballet shoes across the studio floor.