to the girls in my zumba class

Dear girls in my Zumba class,Dear you who is willing to jump up and down to music we don't really know the words to, you who is willing to do the moves with more energy after 50 minutes than I think I have in my whole body, who laughs at our blurred reflections in the mirror,you are what makes me brave. I've been up and down the mountains and hills for a little while now, with this question about food and how to eat and the fact that sometimes I don't know how to finish a bagel in the morning, I'm so nervous that it will upend my life. I've been in the thicket of the thoughts about mirrors and beauty and whether the scars on my stomach from the time I had my gallbladder removed are moments of skin knit together, moments of pride that my body is always doing a healing work on itself, or if I should be embarrassed and try to hide the thin pink line that dances near my belly button.I've thought about writing and not writing, I've written and deleted, and in the end of every day I don't write a blog post about this journey up and down the mountains of that question - am I beautiful? -you are the people I see at the other end.You jumping up and down in the aerobic studio to Pitbull and Lil' Jon. You in old T-shirts and yoga pants and running shorts and neon sneakers and bare feet. You, afraid and unafraid, because we are all a little of both if we are honest. I can't describe how much courage you breathe into my lungs just being in that second row with you.And yes, you know, it is courage to shake my hips and courage to swing them in something that I think might someday look like a circle. And yes, it is courage to keep dancing at minute 50.But it is also courage to be.You give me courage to be, without walls, without the tap tap tap of the prison guard of my mind that says I should eat less run more be more do more perfect more. In Zumba, there is no better and no best, there is just us and the courageous being of us.If I could tell you anything it is that yesterday at the end of class I walked out and realized that I think you are all, each, singly, remarkably, beautiful. I realized that I know this in my bones, that you are beautiful, that you are courageous.And maybe it's time I walked out of a class and thought of me alongside you, as one of those beautiful and bright courageous beings. Maybe it's time I walked out of class and let the lessons you are teaching me sink into my bones.I wish I could paint this for you, write the way you have built my courage from my pink sneakers to my heart, how you have changed me beyond what I had imagined could change. You, with every routine and every sigh and laugh you are rebuilding my idea of what it could mean for me to be beautiful. To be courageous. To be whole.Gratitude is not measured in a word count, so I will only say, again, you have done infinitely more than you know. And this girl, she is learning beautiful from you.Love, hilary

the airport

I was scared out of my mind in the ten minutes before I met you in that airport. I paced in and out of one of those news stands that sells magazines I know I shouldn't buy but almost always do when I'm in airports on my way somewhere, that sells packages of peanut M&Ms and gum. Once I bought a pair of headphones for way too much money because I couldn't imagine flying all the way to Baltimore and then taking the train to DC without a soundtrack (I almost always imagine my life to a soundtrack, as if somewhere someone wants to capture scenes of me with my head against a train window listening to The Civil Wars). I paced in and out of it, over and over, running one hand over my shoulders in that gesture of comfort you've now seen a half dozen times and through my hair, which wouldn't be tamed no matter what I did, thinking about what I would do? The possibility of you, walking toward me in that airport terminal, the possibility of really seeing you...  I was so scared and so excited, and I paced in between packages of peanut M&Ms and People hoping that I'd figure out how to hide from you that my heart was beating a thousand times a minute, because I'd been waiting. And if I had known it, I'd have played "Dust to Dust" on repeat as I waited.Sometimes I think we're afraid of the beautiful.The airport is this place I'd always imagined I'd meet you. In between a few of the times I imagined flying to Scotland in March or driving to Texas (I imagined sitting in my car outside your driveway and just hoping you'd be curious who I was, that you'd walk outside barefoot or your garage door would be open and I would walk in, halfway, and you'd be there painting) - I've always kind of hoped it would be the airport. It carries the ache of leaving and the joy of arriving, the familiar and the new. Somehow, in the long hallways and the too-bright lights, in the incessant announcements of delays and baggage claim carousel numbers, that's where I always find myself again. It is the place where I cried about my sister getting married while eating a bagel from Dunkin' Donuts. It is where I first left home - flying on Air France as an awkward and gangly 9th grader. It is where I first came home - England and Boston, oh, how I remember sobbing my way home from DC in the Baltimore airport at 6am realizing that I left, no certainty, no promise of return to that place.The airport is where I meet that beautiful I am afraid of.That beautiful is living in the carry-on bags courtesy of Virgin Atlantic they used to make for us with crayons and coloring books of airplanes who had friendly faces, in eating too many Twizzlers looking at a bridal magazine in a Houston terminal. The beautiful is in how I pace waiting for you in the basement baggage claim, how I check my phone so often, how I played Horse Feathers in July and country in August, how I used to fly to DC on a whim because something in me was aching for friends and cupcakes and the memory of me, there, and how I would come home, confused and remade.The beautiful is here. Isn't that the point of this long winding post? That the beautiful is arriving, is closer than we think?That first time I found you running with my phone half out of my hand and losing track of the people I ran into on the way, searching for you in the crowds of late afternoon tourists and umbrellas, that was the beautiful.And now, I anchor myself to it again - the beautiful is close to us. Love,hilary