Time for just another moment.

Today was one of the most difficult days I've ever had to face, and I know this is just the beginning of the painful detachment I have to go through for the next two weeks. I say "difficult" with the tears in mind, but these tears were so different than the ones that I'm used to. I didn't publicly sob today because I was sad. Yes, I was sad, but I was also happy, hopeful, lonely, loved, and most of all, nostalgic. Feeling all of those things at once, it's no wonder I bursted a little at the seams (my seams being my tear-ducts).

I performed for the last time on the Vinik stage today. The tears started before I even made it to the dressing room. Reminiscing with old friends about what my school's theatre program has meant to me over the past six years got me started. The funny thing is, although I felt like a phantom walking through the green room, the minute I got into makeup and costume I felt sewn up again.

I performed without shedding a tear. I didn't think, "This is the last time I'll ever do this," as if I had already finished. Everything was present tense, and I threw my soul into it all. I lived the show more fully than I've lived my real life at times. I let go.

The tears came back for the Finale Ultimo, just as I expected. As I stood there under the lights, singing my last ever notes for an audience in that room, I felt all the time I had spent in that very same theatre whooshing by me. Set changes, tech rehearsals, performances, acting classes and other memories seemed to all be clanging together simultaneously: a cacophony of time, space, and growing up. I thought back to the awkward fifthie who was asked to step in for the title character one April day in 2009. That, in turn, makes me think of the passionate senior who proudly stepped into the light as the title character in 2013.

The funny thing is, right after I got off the stage, I felt the loss. The magic has disappeared. Vinik became a room again; the hallway just a hallway; the props just objects. The Theatre Collective would never be mine in the same way.

When I was very young, I had this dream about a toy coming to life. It was extremely vivid, and I remember just how attached the living toy and I had become. We loved each other. At the end of the dream, however, the magic was lost. I remember that the dream ended with me shaking the suddenly lifeless toy, pleading for time to rewind so I could be so happy again. I woke up sobbing. And I never forgot that feeling.

This chapter of my life, doing high school theatre, has closed. It's gone. My director will never be the same guy to me. I will never act with many, if not all, of these people again. Some may never do theatre again. We're all going to get older. We're all going to continue moving. With or without one another.

I was thinking today; there will be so much room for so much more in my life. When I think of who I am, I think of all the anecdotes that brought me to where I am. But hopefully my life will be five times as long as it had been. I've lived so much, felt so much, learned so much, and I might only be 20% of the way through. I can't linger in the beginning forever. I need to let the plot develop and thicken--allow the characters to develop more. Such a great beginning deserves to be seen through to its ending.