Final Bows (March 21st, 2015)
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m thankful to have found in this theatre program and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and tear down the set.
It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night we can't forget. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The quote book and the pictures will remind us in years to come.
Drama Club is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. The unconditional friends. The friends we are only friends with because of this musical. The friends that aren't even friends because, in fact, we can't stand them. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we arrive home way too late for a school night — burdened by pounds of homework and social tension, both too tired and too awake. We won’t have those groups next year. We won’t live in the Volm and choir room. Our closet won't be the dressing room. We won't, with our tiny circles, go out for a drive on an unseasonably warm spring day or grab coffee before rehearsal or cry or laugh together when life throws us some sort of BS like it always seems to. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts. Or 3 a.m. texts. Or 3 a.m. cast parties. Or any of that.
This scares me. More than finishing high school and moving on to college. More than moving 1,009 miles away. More than anything, I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This family. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.
But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and get PhD's and win awards and change lives and make all sorts of terribly wonderful mistakes.
Of course, there are things we wished we did: kept our grades up third quarter (every. dang. year.), practiced harder for auditions. We’re our own toughest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Saying too much. Hurting those we love. More than once I’ve looked back on myself throughout high school and thought: How did I do that? How did I ever survive that? How did I bounce back, how did I keep living? The answer? You just do. You just keep going.
When I joined Drama Club my freshman year, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know I was signing myself over into a new family. A lineage. A tradition. But I felt this crazy strong sense of belonging, even though none of us really belonged anywhere at all. We are all floating, but we are all floating together. Some by coincidence, some by choice. Nonetheless, we float together, and that is good enough for me.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And that feeling is something we don’t have to lose.
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(A collaboration with Marina Keegan's "The Opposite of Loneliness.")