I’m about ten.
My hair’s unruly — wild strawberry blonde curls shooting off in every direction.
I’m in hand-me-down clothes. Jean shorts. A crumpled t-shirt. Probably something with a cracked decal from a bank giveaway or a family reunion I wasn’t at.
To be honest, I don’t look that different today.
The clothes are more expensive now, sure.
But the sense of calm?
Pretty much the same.
I’m spinning — slowly, then faster — in a 70s-style black leather chair.
One of those big ones with a silver metal base that swivels like a dream.
The kind of chair that, to a kid, feels like the cockpit of a spaceship.
It was in pretty good condition, at least as I remember it — no cracks, no rips, just that worn-in kind of cool you only find in places that forgot they were cool decades ago.
The room around me is empty.
Lights off.
Just a dim gray wash from the wall of windows behind me, the kind of light that shows you every speck of dust hanging in the air like snow that forgot how to fall.
I’m in the basement café of an old resort in the Poconos.
A quiet pocket in a building that’s humming with chaos upstairs — thousands of dancers, stage moms, bobby pins, sequins, hairspray clouds.
Glitter in the grout.
Music bleeding through the floor.
And me?
I’m down here.
Taking a break.
Spinning.
Re-centering.
Playing.
I’ve always known when I needed to escape a little.
Even at ten.
Especially at ten.
But I also know what’s waiting for me upstairs —
when I’m ready.
My sister.
Clad in gold.
Floating across the stage.
Not walking.
Not dancing, even.
Floating.
Like the air made way for her.
Like the music knew it was lucky to accompany her.
Like she had an aura.
And everyone else was just borrowing light.
It’s moments like these that have stuck with me.
Not in the big, loud ways — not the birthdays or trophies or whatever came in a scrapbook.
But in quiet.
And in strength.
They’ve attached themselves to who I am, like anchors. Or roots.
I know it’s time.
Time to stop spinning.
Time to race up the escalator and into the chaos.
I weave through a maze of people — dancers warming up in hallways, moms arguing over rhinestones, someone crying over a lost shoe.
I find the right theater.
The perfect seat.
In the back, of course. My legs don’t reach the floor in the folding chair, but I sit tall anyway. Because I know what’s coming.
And then…
The music starts.
The Lord’s Prayer.
And there she is.
Golden.
Glowing.
Beautiful.
Five years older than me, but back then it felt like a lifetime.
We didn’t orbit in the same space.
She was stars and spotlight.
I was quiet corners and observation.
But man, I loved to watch her.
I still do.
She moved like the music had been written for her body.
Every turn, every lift, every breath — deliberate and full of grace.
She won, of course.
How could she not?
That, and her other masterpiece —
“Don’t Stop Me Now.”
The one with the side leap, side leap, center leap sequence.
Perfectly timed with her duet partner.
A full assault of rhythm and rebellion.
A declaration in motion.
Perfection.
I could never dance.
My feet don’t always move in the same direction.
Ask anyone who’s witnessed my attempts at TikTok recreations — I’m more “unintentionally hilarious” than “rhythmically gifted.”
I wasn’t meant to leap across stages.
But sitting in that seat —
in the quiet,
in the back,
feet dangling off the edge of a folding chair —
I could see everything.
The theatrics.
The glitz.
The tiny micro-movements that told the whole story before the music even changed.
The way a dancer’s breath matched the tempo.
The second a judge leaned forward.
The sparkle that wasn’t in the costume — it was in the presence.
And somehow, all of that still glitters inside me.
Not in pirouettes.
But in how I see people.
How I feel them.
How I notice the shift in their voice, or the way they fidget when they’re about to break, or that moment they realize they’ve found their rhythm.
That’s what I love about myself, actually.
I see people.
All the way through.
I’m kneeling now.
Older.
In church.
Bare knees pressed into the barely-padded velvet of a pew.
My eyes are perfectly aligned with the backrest in front of me — a narrow strip of polished wood catching fractured light.
Little ballerinas of sunshine dance across the grain,
flickering with the rhythm of the spotlights
peeking out from the domed paintings of saints above.
And then—
that voice.
The voice of God.
Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
He was singing Ave Maria,
and it swallowed the entire cathedral.
I didn’t know where it came from at first.
It took me years to understand it was rising from the choir loft.
That there was an actual human being attached to that sound.
But it didn’t matter.
The voice was the point.
It hung in the air like it was woven from incense and light —
wrapping itself around every pillar and pew
and tucking gently into the space behind my ribs.
I didn’t care who he was.
I didn’t want to know.
I wasn’t looking for the source.
I was lost in the feeling.
It was another moment I still can’t believe was real.
Another echo that rooted beauty into my heart.
That voice made me feel.
Made me love.
Made me believe that maybe there was something bigger than me,
even if I didn’t know what to name it.
Not everything that built me was visible.
At the top of our stairs, tucked near an old water pipe, there was a little box — barely big enough for a child to fit.
I made it my office.
And I filled it with imagination.
Dee Dee and Dada lived there — my imaginary friends.
And I swear the pipe talked to me.
I talked back.
My sisters thought I was a little crazy.
Maybe they were right.
But they gave me that space.
Or maybe they just wanted me out of their space.
Either way — it was mine.
And it mattered.
Because even in make-believe, I was building something.
A voice.
A structure.
A place to process a world that felt too loud, too bright, too glittering sometimes.
Not all the voices in my internal boardroom were real.
But their impact was.
They helped me understand people.
Helped me understand me.
My middle sister was one of those voices, too.
We both played softball — her on one field, me on another.
Close in geography, lightyears apart in soul.
She was an athlete.
A musician.
A soul-filled beauty who never tried to be anything but herself.
When she went to college, I missed her like crazy.
I visited once.
Her dorm was pure hippy magic — cozy, weird-smelling, layered in color and comfort and incense that didn’t quite cover the other smells.
But it didn’t matter.
The music did.
Guitars.
Singing.
Laughter.
A full soundtrack of life — and somehow, me included.
I can’t sing. Never could.
But belting out Rent at the top of my lungs in that room?
I was a star.
I belonged.
There was love in that chaos.
There always has been.
She never asked me to change.
She just let me be there.
And that, too, is a kind of touch.
I never knew it then.
Not spinning in that leather chair.
Not listening to Ave Maria in the pew.
Not screaming Rent in a college dorm.
Not whispering to pipes at the top of the stairs.
But I’m only just realizing it now:
It was moments like these —
quiet ones,
imagined ones,
glorious ones witnessed from the back row —
that were building the framework of my life.
Not the spotlight.
Not the stage.
But the scaffolding.
The wiring.
The way I see people.
The way I carry beauty.
The way I lead, and love, and believe.
It was all happening.
In the quiet.
While no one was looking.
And it’s still happening now.
We Conquer as One 