Ramona

Oh yeah. This is why we play. This is why we stay up late and endure aching backs, cold feet, and tired eyes as we pound the keys far into the night. This is why we sacrifice our allowances to be terrorized by a teacher for forty-five minutes every week and live our lives in dread of lessons. This is why our parents scrimp and save and fill us with guilt and gratitude and why our siblings scream, sickened with hearing our pieces yet again. This is why we endure weeks of worry; why we cry into our pillows; why we're nervous wrecks for months. This is why we convulse with anxiety, don't eat, feel sick. This is why we try endlessly to make friends with butterflies. Why we sacrificed an A on that paper. This is why we're willing to stand on shaking legs to take our first bows: For the second bows. The ones where the roar of the applause reaches our ears across the hall and crashes to shore on the stage around us, flooding through the dam of forgetfulness we've built all this time and letting loose our feelings, no more held back, but broken loose on our faces in radiant smiles that utterly wash away that dam that we've built up since last time that's kept back our joy with tears and fear and worry and pain. And that's when we remember that This is why we play. Oh yeah.