Waiting

In life, one of the worst things that we have to do is wait. Pain and dying are worse, but waiting is a close second. Waiting in line to buy your lunch when you feel like your stomach is going to turn inside out from hunger, waiting in convenient care feeling miserable while surrounded by other miserable people, waiting for that stupid bell to ring already to you can make a mad dash to the bathroom right after class ends. But sometimes there are those waits that take weeks, months even, that seem to enjoy purposefully disturbing your sleep and your life. As a constantly stressed person who heavily relies on sleep to function as a human being, I dislike waiting, whether it's for a short or long time.

One of those painfully long waits just ended for me. The cause of that particular wait was a cast list. I dance with the Champaign Urbana Ballet, and every winter we dance the Nutcracker. We had our yearly auditions for the Nutcracker on the Saturday of August, but the cast list was not posted until yesterday. It was nearly three weeks in between audition and posting. That wait is always nerve-wracking, but since this year there was a longer gap than usual between auditions and posting, the wait was nearly unbearable for me.

In the first week or so of the wait, I found myself not thinking about the list too much (only every couple of hours or so). It was easier to put it out of my mind, I suppose, when the day of the posting was rather far away. But towards the end of the three weeks, as the suspense rose, I found myself constantly thinking about it. It got to a point that I had to actively try to think of something else to push the recurring thoughts to the back of my head, but they always came forward sooner or later. 'I wonder who's going to be Rose Queen this year? Well, this person did a really good job at the audition and is also pretty good at partnering. Oh, but that person would be great as Ice Fairy too! I wonder who else...'

Then that day, posting day, finally came. We were told the cast list would be up on the company website by 5pm, but I, along with many other fellow dancers, started checking the day before. We would anxiously check between classes and reload the website, disappointed every time it showed no link to the cast list. When we passed by each other in the halls, we would greet each other with a disappointed face and a 'nope, still not up.' During our free periods and lunch, we would check almost obsessively. Take the last bite of the apple and check for the cast list. So the limit of f(x) equals 4.5, check the work, then check for the cast list.

Finally, 3:50 pm. The last bell rang, and I nervously whipped out my phone to reload the page for the nth time that day when I noticed I had a little notification of a text. I briefly glanced at it, expecting it to be something from my parents about when ballet would end that day. All I saw was 'spoiler alert' and 'cavalry,' but since cavalry was a role in the Nutcracker and the only thing that could be spoiled for me were my roles, I jammed my eyes shut and unlocked my phone to make that stupid little notification go away. I wanted to see my roles straight from the cast list. It's always more satisfying that way, ending the wait with your own hands.

The phone unlocked right to the webpage where the link would come up, since that was the last (and pretty much only) thing I had used my phone for that day. I reloaded the page, waited impatiently, then got more impatient when it wouldn't load. I shouldered my backpack and headed out of the classroom, heading towards the lockers of a couple other dancers, all the while staring at my blank screen and willing it to finish loading faster.

Before I even got remotely close to my friends' lockers, I ran into them. They were already exclaiming congratulations, and I had to tell them to 'please hold up my stupid webpage won't load oh it loaded oh crap where's the list I can't find it oh never mind I found it argh it's not loading again...ah. It loaded.'

That entire time, since I saw the 'spoiler alert' message, I felt that stomach-dropping feeling of anticipation mixed with fear and excitement. It's a little bit like what you feel at the top of the roller coaster ride, when the coaster is moving extremely slowly, when you know in seconds you're going to be hurtling down a hill at high speed. In this case, the long wait would be over in seconds, and I subconsciously realized that I could go about my life and sleep well again, not lying awake wondering which friend will get which role.

My friends had their phones out as well, all scrolling through the list. Other Uni dancers trickled by to join us, all exclaiming congratulations and crowding in the middle of the hallway. Our mini party dispersed after a group hug, big smiles on everyone's faces.

The wait was over. The cast list was out, congratulations were in order for everyone else at the studio, and rehearsals would begin soon, but never soon enough. And so I wait again, this time for the beginning of rehearsals. Then the next wait would be for performances. Then the next cast list, and so on.

In the future, it seems that I have a lot of waiting in store for me. But so does everyone else. School, like ballet, is also a serious of waits, although many times the wait is filled with more dread than anticipation, especially for tests and essays. But those are little waits, the short, easier waits. There's also many long waits in store for the near future, such as waiting for your SAT/ACT score to come out and waiting for that college letter to arrive. Since our lives could be seen as just a series of waits, little and big, I suppose I should relax a little, take each new event at its own pace, and keep on waiting.