I’ve always been someone who keeps notes. Birthday cards, folded sticky notes, even gum wrappers with tiny messages, all stuffed in boxes, hung on my wall, or tucked into my phone case. Small reminders that I was seen and remembered in someone else’s life.
I don’t think I ever really outgrew that.
I’ve always cared about the way people put things into words; how something small can hold onto a feeling long after the moment has passed. But the way people feel can’t always be captured like that. Even as a writer, the language that has always made the most sense to me has been music.
This is a love letter to Rubyfruit.
Passing Notes: Growing Up With Music
Music has always been a constant in my life — but not always in the same way.
I grew up with music. Piano lessons, dance classes, orchestra, choir — anything that kept me surrounded by sound. For a long time, it felt easy. Like something that I didn’t have to think about, just something I was part of.
In high school, that relationship shifted. After a typical seven-hour school day, I would take a bus to my second high school — yes, a second one, every day. I attended a performing arts school, where I pursued musical theater during my freshman and sophomore years alongside regular academics.
But somewhere along the way, music stopped feeling like something I got to do and started feeling like something I had to keep up with. I don’t think I noticed it happening in real time; it just gradually faded out.
I didn’t return to the second school for my second half of high school. After that, music became something I did alone.
I taught myself guitar in my room, playing the same chords over and over, and singing along to karaoke tracks when I was home alone. It was still music, but it felt smaller. Like I had all the pieces, but nowhere to put them. I told myself I was too busy to get back into it, that I had fallen too far behind to try again in any real way. So I kept it to myself.
The Missing Note: Sisterhood
While I tend to understand the world better through music, I have always been able to understand it through people, too. I grew up with a big sister, and she’s still my best friend — the person who knows me in a way that feels effortless. We have always been the kind of close that you don’t really question, until distance quietly changed what that closeness looked like in everyday life.
We still talk every day. That didn’t change when I left for college. But I started to notice the small things, like the instinct to turn and tell her something, and those moments that used to be shared in real time were now arriving a little later than they used to. So when I first got to the University of Connecticut, I sat on the floor of my dorm and played my guitar, but that just wasn’t the same either.
And then I found Rubyfruit.
Before college, I never could have imagined joining an a cappella group. I had seen Pitch Perfect maybe twice in my life. And after spending so long feeling like music had become something private and contained, I stopped thinking of myself as someone who could perform anymore. Even though I still loved watching live performances, I couldn’t really picture myself on stage.
So when I went to the Fall Rush Concert in September with a friend, I wasn’t expecting anything in particular. I thought I was just there to watch.
But as I sat there and saw each group perform, one of them stood out in a way I didn’t expect. Everything about them felt bright, glittery — almost right out of a movie, but also strangely real.
What surprised me the most wasn’t just that I noticed them, it was that, for the first time in a long time, I wanted to be up there too.
I auditioned for them, and only them.
Walking into the room felt different from what I had prepared myself for. Every other audition of my life, I had the same pit in my stomach, the same pressure. But standing in front of the Rubies, I didn’t feel like I needed to prove anything; it just felt easy in a way I hadn’t experienced with music in a long time. I instantly fell in love.
Finding My Note: Again
Now I have 18 sisters: one at home, and 17 here in Storrs.
I’m only at the end of my freshman year, which means I still have three more years with them. But somehow, it already feels like I’ve known them for a lifetime.
There is something about the way time moves here; how quickly strangers become sisters, how voices blend like they were made to fit together, and how something new starts to feel like something you’ve always had.
To the current members of Rubyfruit, I say thank you for — not just the music, but the feeling of having a place to be part of it again. Rubyfruit feels like home.
I’ve spent so long holding onto the notes people have given me — small reminders that I was seen, that I mattered to someone else.
This feels different. Not something I just keep, but something I get to be part of. Something that exists in real time, with other people, in a way that doesn’t need to be saved to last.
Some notes you read. Some you sing. These are the ones I’ll keep.
Once a Ruby, always a Ruby.