to a pea of the pod

with you, I dance in perfect time

Hey, vivacious. You've taught me what it means to be both tenacious and gracious. Few can withstand so gracefully the pressures that you did and still do. You soar above the silver lining, gesturing with enthusiasm toward those beauties that evade us, the colorblind; out-chuckling others' sad, sarcastic snickers; baring your heart's fanciful flights and flickers so honestly. You don't fear people like the rest of us do; you vivify them.

There's a certain species of moment that I miss the most: a summer afternoon in the living room of my old house, us languishing on the couch much in the manner of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, listening to Kapustin and then your Scherzo. You had your signature polka-dotted pants on. Another time, in mid-January, right before the audition that always corresponded with your birthday: we closed our eyes and recited our pieces in our heads, waited patiently for the other to "wake," then took turns as each other's live audience. That's a world stuck somewhere in space-time that only you and I will remember.

Some wordy words from À la recherche du temps perdu: "The very memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void."

Of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity. At the keyboard or away, you chisel these from the fray of formal notation. To the endlessly inspiring Vivian Wang: may your nineteenth year be marked by even purer tenderness, deeper passion, greater courage, and truer serenity. Love you, forever!