animal print pants.

Today was beautiful, as it always is. Despite the griping and moaning about dance politics (and believe you me, dance probably has more politics and drama than the field of politics… and the field of drama), it was magic.

For me, it’s not necessarily about the people. Because we’re all classically trained - 13 years and counting for me - our practices run shorter. Which means less bonding time. Does that mean I don’t care about my groupmates? Absolutely not. But I’ve been the only girl who’s done this dance every year for the past few years, and others have drifted in and out of the choreography.

For me, it’s the performance. The day when all you have to eat is cereal and a piece of toast with peanut butter and french fries and water and sprite. Running up and down the stone stairs under the stage, hearing the first act open and the cries and shrieks from the audience gathered in UCLA’s world-renowned Royce Hall. It’s the sound of my feet when my bells are wrapped around them as I practice the steps on the linoleum in the room separated from the entryway by a plastic curtain, alone, after the other girls have taken a break, when it’s just me and my feet.

It’s that feeling of complete euphoria when people applaud your performance, the lights, the sound, the smiles on the other girls’ faces as we do slow, deliberate knee turns or fast, frenzied footwork. It’s the hugs and pats on the back from beloved friends who take time from packed schedules to see the show. It’s the walking barefoot on concrete, skipping through halls, and shrieks from girls fretting over bobby pins in the dressing rooms. It’s about the silence in the rehearsal hall after everyone has left, when you stand and admire the art that’s bigger than you are, and so much a part of your life.

And it was the last time that it’s all going to happen in college for me. The last time I run up and down those stone steps, the last time I help a frantic performer put on lipstick or safety pin a blouse. The last time someone calls my name from the Royce audience and I wonder, smiling, who it was. And dragging my suitcase back to my apartment and taking off my costume and makeup reminded me that this is the beginning of the end. There are many, many goodbyes and lasts in the next 2 weeks - the remaining 2 weeks. And saying goodbye to dance was definitely unsettling. 

We all have to leave a place eventually, I guess. I will always have the lights and those stone steps with me, and I will always look back on these three performances over the years with a smile. Happy that they happened, not sad that they’re gone.

first goodbye wasn’t so bad. 

too bad there’s still 1293840983048093284 left. 

with 2 hours to go before the third-largest event I’ve ever planned (yet somehow most stressful):

1. do not give people choices that they did not want to consider in the first place. it will confuse them, it will confuse you.

2. do not believe that other people are more important than you are if it is also your event. especially your last event.

3. do not think that just because you get good news you will immediately be happy. sometimes, hours after, once you are at your laptop in the dark privacy of your room,  you will have the reaction, the hysteria, that you were expecting all along.

Thank you, aai and baba, for bringing two small suitcases across an ocean, one of you, to a country you had never been to before. Thank you for working hard to make sure we never felt your wants, never struggled through your needs. Thank you for giving us every opportunity to be spoiled, to be selfish, and to take for granted all of the things that you witnessed your peers and parents fight tooth and nail over.

but.

Thank you for not spoiling us, for making me sit in our family room after school every day and memorize multiplication tables before I could watch tv. Thank you for not giving us everything we wanted, for making us earn - either by cleaning, studying, general good behavior, or a combination of the three - everything we asked for. Thank you for teaching us about a culture separated from us by an ocean, for reminding us of your journeys and how ours compared and contrasted. Thank you for shipping us off to aaji’s for a summer so we could learn, as she smacked our hands with a ruler at every mistake, our tongue - for enabling me to,  with some review, speak four languages. Thank you so, so much for instilling in us the drive to work, to toil, to hope, and to achieve the power that can transform two small suitcases into a life in another land. You have given us the strength, the resilience, the cunning - well, perhaps not all of your most admirable traits were passed down equally between two children, as I’m still caught taking the road of greatest resistance more often than not - the adaptability, the faith, and the spirit of our heritage and tradition.

Most importantly, thank you for your trust and your love. You had have every reason to take shortcuts, to resent a system you were forced to learn from the ground up, and to pull inwards and concentrate on the familiar. Instead you embrace (the majority of) your surroundings, you push us into the (mutually) unknown, and you have always, always believed in us. In me. Thank you for being my support system, my perennial teachers.

Thank you, aai and baba, for being my parents.