Elizabeth

Finally, I had found a vacant room. I was only waiting for everyone else to leave the Academy so that I could train on my own.

I played one of my favourite songs and I started dancing.

I don’t why or how, but as the music flooded the room, disrupting time and space, I surrendered and left my passion for dance take control. Without thinking too much about the technique, I danced following the song’s melody.

For the first time, this song had a different effect on me: it moved me to tears making me feel a sense of melancholy that I had never experienced before. For the first time since living alone to study at the Academy, I missed home and I missed my cousin who was like a brother to me.

I was so possessed by the music that, if someone had entered the room in that moment, I wouldn’t have noticed.

This nostalgic feeling reminded me of that instant in which, still young, I had decided that I would follow my dream at all costs. That day was very special to me, and I wonder why it came to my mind only now, after I had already been at the Academy for one whole year.

I was ten years old and I was at the seaside with my cousin. He always took me to new places, but that day we had decided to go to the usual beach, not far from home. He was twelve years older than me, so we could wander around alone.

But that day was different. My cousin had brought with him his camera, and after playing and swimming, he looked at me murmuring that he wanted to wait for the sunset and took a photo of this moment.

And so we waited, and I sat next to him and observed while he took pictures. When he finished he turned towards me with changed expression, as if the sunset had truly affected him. That picture must have been very important to him. We stared each other in the eyes for a bit and then he said:

‘I wanted to take a photo of this sunset because it represents the end of something’.

He sat down close to me, and we continued gazing at the sun that slowly disappeared in the sea.

‘You see Elizabeth, I want to photograph as many sunrises and sunsets as possible, all around the world. I want to collect all kinds of adventures. I want to follow my dream and become a photographer’.

One year later, one the same day, he left to pursue his dream. Or at least he told me so, and I replied saying that I would’ve done the same thing. And so I did. I was eleven years old then, and I had chosen to follow my dream seeing my cousin leaving our house without coming back for only God’s knows how long.

My dream has always been that of becoming a contemporary dance dancer.

In my entire life, I had always limited myself to follow rules who someone else had written for me: go to the Academy, learn the technique, and so on.

But not that evening. Maybe I was meant to remember all of this exactly on this night, because that same night, in an unusual way, I would meet Daphne.

She turned my life upside down.