Three More Drops and One More Song…. (05/05/11

It’s so hard to believe that this whole thing is winding to a close. When you’re finishing a contract you somehow suddenly become closer to the friends you’ve made – probably because, like when you’re finishing a show – you know you’re leaving them behind soon. Once you walk down the gangway your lives scatter to the four winds…until next time. In some cases there isn’t a next time, in some cases the next time takes months or years to arrive. We run into each other again, gradually, slowly, but it takes time.

One of the hardest parts of my wonderful existence is that I really am always saying goodbye. You learn to galvanize your heart against it, to not feel it, or at least to feel it less than you did when you first started. Even now, with only a year’s worth of contracts under my belt, I feel the pang of separation far less than I did on my first time out. At the end of my first contract I sobbed like a baby for hours – or possibly for days, I don’t remember.

It seems like longer ago than it was.

There has been a lot that’s happened on this contract that I can’t talk about in these pages; a lot of things that happen below the waterline and between the words have to stay that way. There are limits to just how much I can put anywhere where it can be stumbled upon by the general public – and quite frankly, there’s a lot that isn’t anyone’s business but my own. I haven’t really talked about how much this contract has changed me, because that involves talking about things that well – that I can’t talk about.  I’ve not talked about the differences in the woman I see in the mirror (and I don’t just mean the fact that I’ve gained three pounds that I’m trying now to shed again). I haven’t even complained about the food – which has, on occasion, actually been pretty terrible.

So much, so much in four short months that are swiftly winding to a finish. A welcome close I might add. I may have been here for three extra weeks, but for me this contract ended when the World Cruise did. This last two weeks has been a dénouement, a welcome breather after a very hard four months, but a tag-on none-the-less, the epilogue to the first chapter in the story.

Those of you who’ve known me forever (which is most of you I imagine), if you were to see me now, you would recognize me – I look the same, if only because I haven’t yet changed my hair – but if you were to really look at me, you’d see something different . Something you couldn’t quite place.

Perhaps this contract I finally realized something: growing up doesn’t mean suddenly becoming serious, or stopping believing in things you always have. Growing up means accepting who you are, and what’s happened to you, and what the world has given you – and that just because you have a past, just because you have a history, doesn’t mean that past has the right to shape who you become, or what you choose to do. Growing up means being able to look yourself in your own eyes and love what you see there.

This contract…I think I grew up.