MOOP!

Last Waltz, taken by Kevin Hollenbeck.

This is...damn. That ballroom (and attached house) has been in mom's/mine friends group for...whuf. My entire life plus some?

That ballroom is almost definitely the place where I experienced my first waltz. My first polka. My earliest forays into couple dancing, when I was eight-nine-ten-eleven-far too young to appreciate the form. It's where I came back to when I started being a dancer again, all through college --every trip to Maryland was arranged to see if I could stack it against a dance night. There was Oella too, but there's something magical about that house, all purple and beautiful and with the whiteboard listing dances and the guest book listing dancers.

That ballroom hosted the first dance of my first pair of dance shoes.

(And let's not even get started on the Grand Marches. I am an outright fucking *snob* about marches, for better or for worse, and it's all because I have been doing this since I was just a kid. Every month. With astounding dancers. If your grand march does not wind all throughout the house and up the stairs and back down again, just don't even talk to me, I'm not interested.)

And...Alex and Renee are selling it, which is totally their prerogative. Apparently it's going to a contra caller, so at least the ballroom will still be used as it should be and not turned into a basketball court or rec room or torn down entirely. But...it's leaving the group who taught me how to dance. And I missed my chance to say goodbye.

Last Waltz.

Always such a difficult concept, but never before has it felt so final.

I am not crying anymore. You don't need to give me sympathy or hugs, though I won't especially mind them, especially if they're accompanied by an actual comment.

But sometimes I do cry, and when I do, I generally look like absolute shit. Tonight pretty much wasn't an exception. But if I shade my eyes and look away, there is beauty in all that pain. Because I'm human, and because crying is human, and humans are beautiful.

One of the things I feel in the back of my mind is that I don't post enough pictures to this journal. I think it would be nice to change that. I like this self portrait.

Not every picture I take is taken from before the walls¹. Every once in a while, I take one behind.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Behind the Walls is a term I've used for most of five years now. It is everything that is secret, and not for anyone but me to know. Sometimes I share it, a little. Theoretically, I've been getting better at sharing over the past few years. Before the Walls would, of course, be anything that anyone could see --most of this journal.