To my old dance team,

I remember my first day of dance classes like it was yesterday. But it wasn't. It was fourteen long years ago on the second Saturday of September right after Labor Day in 2002. Not all of you were there that day. In fact, many of your first days weren't the same as mine, but instead years later. In the very end, there were only four of us left from our original class, leaving our childhood studio with fourteen years of experience in dance.

This past June when I performed with all of you on my high school's auditorium stage for one last time, I knew I wasn't leaving with just years' worth of lessons in dance, but lifelong friends. Scratch that: my second family.

June was a weird month for most of us. The majority of our class had just graduated high school, and were preparing to go off to college while learning to accept the fact that we would no longer spend endless days and nights together. Somehow we went to seeing each other every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday (and every day in-between that we hung out), to being cities, or even states apart.

My intention of writing this letter is to not dwell on distance, either in communication or physical miles, but to thank you for the past fourteen years of my life. I don't think I can verbally express how much you all mean to me.

Sometimes just seeing your faces and hearing your voices in the middle of a bad week, or afterwards at the beginning of the weekend could instantly put me in a better mood. There's no one like all of you that I can be as comfortable around, and genuinely be myself around. Those two things alone mean more to me than any of you probably could ever know or understand.

I miss our team. Honestly, I cannot wait to start dancing with some of you again soon to have that part of my life back.

But until then, study hard and keep dancing.

Love,

Haley