The Last Dance//October 234th, 2022

 This past Saturday, I received possibly the worst type of news someone can ever receive regarding a loved one.

I was notified that my cousin was shot and killed. 

For the sake of the ongoing investigation, and of course the privacy of my family and those closest to her, I'm not going to name any names here. But there is so much about her I want to talk about. For the remainder of this post, I will refer to her by a name she often asked to be called in childhood, as her absolute passion in life was ballet. Her name, for the sake of this post, will be Clara. 

Clara was significantly younger than me, born in 1996. She was the first of my younger cousins whose birth I truly understood and got excited about. I remember being so happy that my aunt's due date was in September. I was actually hoping that the baby and I might share a birthday, but Clara wound up being born closer to the end of the month. Still, though, we wound up having quite a bit in common.

My other cousins were all pretty extroverted. One thing that they absolutely  loved doing when the entire family got together was putting on shows for everyone, which, as the shy, introverted one, was not my thing at all. It caused many silly fights over the years, as we were all too young to understand our different personality types and comfort levels. But Clara, even from a very young age, was very clearly a shy little girl too. From baby and toddlerhood, she was very clearly uncomfortable with large groups or being expected to "perform" in any way for anyone outside of her immediate family. She must have sensed this in me too, because she seemed to take to me, and, despite our age difference, for most of our childhoods, we bonded in a way that I don't think any of our other cousins could understand.

Often times when our other cousins were being loud and boisterous, Clara and I would be off by ourselves doing classic "introvert" things. Sometimes I would read to her, sometimes we'd watch a movie, sometimes we'd just sit quietly while the others planned out whatever show they were going to put on that day. It got to the point where, whenever we had a family gathering coming up, she would always ask if I was going to be there. 

I had a hard time expressing it when I was younger, but I did struggle a lot with my relationships with my cousins as a child, due to the extreme differences in personality. Knowing that I always had Clara, despite how much younger she was than me, was a true comfort. 

One of the truly amazing things about Clara, though, was her deep love for ballet. This was something that started at a very young age with her. I've known a lot of little girls through the years that have gone through a "ballerina" phase in some form...my childhood best friend's sister probably spent the entire first year I knew her in a tutu. Very few girls I ever knew actually stuck with dance in that way, but Clara did. From the moment she learned her first step, all she wanted to do was dance. Nothing more, nothing less.

Clara moved out of state to attend college, and then again to a different state when she was offered a job with a ballet company. In between there were issues within the family and keeping in touch became more difficult. I'm honestly not sure exactly when I saw her last, in person, but I can tell you that no matter what the distance between us was, I have always been so proud of her, maybe even a little jealous, but not in a malicious way. Here was a little girl who was painfully shy, in a very similar way to how I was, but she had a dream and she stuck with it. She dedicated her life to dancing and was able to live her dreams to the fullest. I always think about how hard it must have been for her to perform in front of people given her shyness and anxieties, but she had a passion and didn't let anything stop her. She always did, and still continues to, inspire me. It's absolutely awful that her beautiful life was cut short. I take just the slightest comfort in knowing she at least had the opportunities to do what she loved and lived her dreams while she was still here. I just know she would have had an even brighter future. Thinking of all that's been lost, makes me feel determined to finally live out my own dreams. I need to remember what she could do, and know that she'd want me to live as fulfilling a life as she did.

I don't know what happens when you die, but I truly hope that wherever Clara is now, she's still dancing.