It’s about to be Friday of Pilobolus SI, Week 3.

How do you express what it feels like to come to a place that somehow helps you heal pieces of your past that happened what feels like a lifetime ago?

Last night we went to the Joyce, saw P7 perform the same program I caught last time but from the other side of the house (highly recommended, btw), chatted with old friends in the company, then ran for the 1 train, horsed around on the near-empty S train (without inconveniencing anyone), dashed wildly through the tunnels into Grand Central’s main terminal (again, without inconveniencing anyone), caught the Metro North with ten minutes to spare, ate Sour Streamers (also highly recommended), and generally conducted ourselves like unsupervised kids.

It was honestly pretty sublime.

I still love to run up an escalator when there’s nobody on it.

After the train ,T and I drove back to campus, kvetching about drivers and over-bright headlights and bad road design and listening to queer, Jewish punk rock, and that was sublime.

Tonight, after a day packed with dancing, we sang show tunes (and Scarborough Faire, which must be a theater-kid staple because my sister and her friends loved it, too) around the piano.

That was also sublime.

Not everything here is.

What we do here is work, and some of it is the difficult work of making art with other artists, even when we’re collectively sleep-deprived and hopped up on enough caffeine to give the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir a heart attack. Artists are jammed with ideas and typically pretty self-directed, and there’s so little time, but we figure it out.

We are the cats, and we are the herders of cats (which, to be honest, is pretty much how actual cats work, when you think about it—only a cat can tell another cat where to go[1]).

We make our way through the difficulties, and in between, we get to be, for better or worse, overgrown dance kids at dance camp. Only we’re mostly kinder to each-other now than maybe we would have been when we were *actual* dance kids, in middle- or high school.

We rattle around in the dorms and bring way too much food but somehow not enough of that one thing, but someone else has it or it’s on the community table or in the community fridge or at any rate something close enough is, so we figure it out.

Our towels hang on the racks in the hallway. Our rooms are full of dancewear and endless snacks and foam rollers and massage guns and candy. We have fans in our windows and other fans strapped to our bunks. There may be an illegal toaster. We’ve written our names on signs on our doors, then added drawings: a hedgehog, a kitty, a skull, a nonrepresentational swirl.

The kitchen is cursed, but we make it work.

Tomorrow, we wrap up with a show, as we always do. I’m in one piece I love (I get to jump, so I’m happy) and a couple others that are coming together. 

I am not struggling to remember the choreography.

Maybe at another point in my life, I would have said, “I wish I could stay here forever.”

I’ve learned, though, that part of the magic is exactly the fact that we go home eventually. Not because it keeps this experience from developing the inevitable annoyances of everyday life (we run into them, if on a smaller time-scale), but because if I didn’t go back to the world at large, I couldn’t take what I’ve learned here and live in it out there.

I am grateful that here, for a little while, I’ve been just a dancer, and young, and free to be a little irresponsible—a little bit wild—when I’m out of the studio. I am grateful that I’ve been part of the whole.

It’s hard to express how healing that is to the kid in me who never managed to learn that trick; who was never part of the pack running full-tilt for the stairs to the terminal, laughing like loons.

I think what I’m saying is this: I cannot change the past—but it seems that my heart is rewritable.

Notes

[1] “‘Cause a cat’s the only cat who knows where it’s at,” presumably.