Standing to be recognized for his IB Career Diploma.
His first day of kindergarten was the longest he’d ever been away from me. He learned to write sentences, make friends and discovered his love for dance through Freeze Dance Fridays. His last day of senior year he’s written essays for his IB History and English courses, he’s navigated the ups and downs of friendship and is still friends with some of his classmates from kindergarten, and his love for dance has become his career pursuit. Most phases of childhood end without you realizing; you go from exhausting diapers to independent kindergarten to moody middle school to social dynamics high school. Sometimes you are so eager for that phase to end or excited for what comes next that you don’t even realize it’s over and that you’ll never see that two year old, five year old, fourteen year old, sixteen year old again and that you never said goodbye.

This time I get to say goodbye. To the eighteen year old that navigated the stress, rejection and success of the college application process, that embraced the opportunity of his lifetime as a Collective Season XI member and grew as a dancer and human, that experienced his first heartbreak, that celebrated his senior year milestones with a growing group of high school friends, that inspired, teased, and prioritized Penny and Oliver, and with whom I got to travel the country and celebrate his acceptance, who cried on my shoulder and sought my advice, and who I get to wake up every morning with a back scratch and a kiss on the cheek. He will soon move across the country, study a field completely unfamiliar to me, be surrounded by people I may never meet and do things I may never know and we’ll welcome that next age just like we did with all the others, with inevitability and anticipation.

“You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. but mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!