The Dark Space (15 page)

After what seems like hours, the campanile begins to play, a jumble of bells, and the faculty stop their noise all at once, fall into silence, and then they drop into bows and curtsies, heads down.

The graduates walk past this supplication, the bells pealing into the air, and when they have accepted the honor of the faculty and made a silent loop of campus, one last walk as students cross ground as familiar as our own heartbeats, the bells stop and the students are graduated.

Graduated, because they have accepted wildness, accepted gratitude, accepted contemplation and journey, and finally, accepted each other, because after the bells stop, everyone embraces and exchanges their mortarboards. No one leaves with the one they came to the ceremony wearing.

The first time I watched the ceremony, I was a freshman.

I watched with tears running down my face, partly because I was so moved, so
aching
with feeling, and partly because my first year had been such a disappointment, and I couldn’t imagine making it to this ceremony and accepting anyone or anything.

The noise, I didn’t realize, is
incredible
.

The drums, the snapping poppers, the yelling, the music. I can’t hear myself at all, and I am yelling—

Huzzah!

Professor Darling’s regalia is fantastic, red and white with actual lace cuffs, long and trailing, and it somehow suits him. When he sees me and Cal, he drops his drum and embraces us together, more effusive than I have ever known him, his arms so tight around both of us that Cal and I are nearly back to front. I can feel all of us laughing, or crying, I can’t tell. When he pulls back he kisses Cal on the forehead, his hand on the back of his head, and then he takes my face in his hands and kisses me right on the mouth, and it’s the exact right thing to do.

I feel wild.

I feel accepted.

I feel perfect.

When the noise stops and the faculty bow, I let my tears fall straight from my heart into the air.

Cal laces his fingers through mine, and we walk.

He shows me the spot where he stopped me one cold day in January and I almost hit him. I show him the tree where I saw Becky and John Darling making out one night when I was walking back to my dorm from the library.

Our clasped hands tighten, then relax, and we leave each other to our own thoughts.

The campus looks the same, of course. I wonder when it would look different, or if it ever will, even when it inevitably changes.

I look at the buildings, the people, memories flashing through my mind, visions of Cal, of Beth, of Marvin and Finn, of myself over four years of seasons, learning, changing.

When we come back to the center of the quad and the bells stop, I see her.

I know you
, I think, startled.

Because she is me.

She is me, three years ago, and I see her standing there, arms wrapped around her body, and she is just the same.

She’s so beautiful. She doesn’t even know it.

Not yet.

But I do.

I will always know you
, I tell that girl who is me three years ago, watching her first graduation ceremony with tears running down her cheeks.

I get right inside her, where it is dark, and I tell her to drop the art history class she’s registered for and take the theater prerequisite in the spring.

I tell her that it’s okay to linger in the lobbies of buildings where people are laughing, to ask someone who knitted their scarf, to get A-minuses — or B-minuses, for that matter.

After all, a B-minus is what Maggie gave me in Theater 309.

It was the best grade I have ever received.

I tell her,
I love you, Winnie-girl. Keep an eye out for me.

She’ll always be here.

I’ll always be here.

You are here.

I am
here
.

Authors:
Ruthie Knox and Mary Ann Rivers

First Readers:
Kelly Lauer, Julie Darby, Marian Whitaker, Barbara Homrighaus, Rachel Hollis

Copyeditor:
Kelly Lauer

Cover Photography:
Jishnu Guha Digital Designs

Cover Models:
Santiago Quintana and Melina Montesino

Photography Art Direction:
Marian Whitaker

Cover Design:
Book Beautiful

Proofreader:
Beaumont Hardy Editing

Interior Art:
Book Beautiful

Interior Design:
Williams Writing, Editing & Design

Contact improvisational dance is integrated into many arts, dance, and theater programs all over the world.
The Dark Space
is fiction, and as such takes elements from this kind of contemporary dance, as well as from acting study theory, and dramatizes the class Winnie and Cal found themselves in. As the authors, we are aware that Cal and Winnie’s experience will feel familiar to those who study drama and movement arts, and very unfamiliar, as well, to many who have not, and we want to encourage readers who are interested in the ideas presented about contact improvisational dance, or other acting theories discussed, to read about them, go to performances, and take classes.

When our intern, Marian Whitaker, read the manuscript, she was on the verge of graduation from a college very similar to Cal and Winnie’s. She found herself struggling, so much, with the book’s inevitable march to graduation, because she felt as conflicted as Winnie and Cal about the ends of things, the beginnings of others. She confessed that she held her breath the whole time she read about the period after Cal and Winnie’s spring break, worried about how these characters would end and would begin, wondering how she would. She read their graduation scene weeping until she reached a kind of catharsis. Talked to us about loss and everything after.

Marian is who we wrote this for — the Marian both of us had been during this time when late night conversations anticipated magic, and everyone seemed beautiful, and it was so easy to be lonely even while we were more intimate with others than we had ever been. Writing this, we realized we were the girls we had always been, that we had always been there, and that we were always capable of what we believed we were on the cusp of college graduation. Always. We were enough. The world needed us. Just as this book needed all these people.

Just as the world needs you.

Brain Mill Press would like to acknowledge the support of the following patrons:

Noelle Adams

Katherine Bodsworth

Lea Franczak

Barry and Barbara Homrighaus

Kelly Lauer

Susan Lee

Sherri Marx

Aisling Murphy

Audra North

Virginia Parker

Cherri Porter

Erin Rathjen

Robin Drouin Tuch

Ride with Me

About Last Night

Room at the Inn

Roman Holiday

How to Misbehave

Along Came Trouble

Flirting with Disaster

Making It Last

Truly

Deeper

Harder

The Story Guy

Snowfall

Live

Laugh