I'm an affectionate person: easily attached and never really able to un-care.
In my last year of high school, I thought I was so ready to leave. I wanted to leave what had become my comfort zone, to expand into the world and all the opportunities laid out there for me. And in a way, I have. I've left comfort zones I didn't even know I dwelled in, grasped opportunities I never dreamed would exist anywhere within my world. I'm in love with the people I see every day, my professors, my friends, my classes, all the different perspectives I hear and take in.
And yet. I always walk around with a little bit of wistfulness, some part of me longing for people and moments that were just magical.
Almost everyone who talks to me hears, at some point, about John Carmichael's concerto that I played in 2014 with the SLHS orchestras. I don't think anyone ever quite believes me when I talk about it, because words are so insufficient - how can I ever begin to talk about why I cried the last time I performed it? It certainly wasn't just because it was the last time. There's just a certain magic in that particular piece, in looking out not at the audience, but at my conductor painting the air with her hands, at my friends making it happen, at the piano keyboard in front of me and marveling how this all ever came together to form this moment.
It was one of those moments that I can spend my whole life chasing a career just to try to feel one more time.
But I've learned how, in being so in love with that moment, I have to let it go to continue with my other Magical Snippets of Time. It's a lot like saying goodbye to my best friends, now moving on in college and living their dreams, now in high school and about to embark on their self-created paths, now here, tomorrow somewhere far away. You won't always be able to replace their part in your life; you just learn to live without. And a lot of it is about acceptance of the bittersweetness of it all. I keep thinking that I'll never have that moment again - I may or may not ever play another concerto with an orchestra, and it could be "bigger," but it won't be the same. And now I'm learning that it's okay. There's something different to enjoy in everything. I just need to be able to say to these moments and to my best friends of now, of the past, of the future... thank you for stopping by.