It comes when I’m a little overtired. Just past the point when I’ve given in to the wear. I look for a good story, a tale, to spin me into my dream world. My alter reality, one of many different realities I am and could be living right now[CG1] . Sometimes, it’s the life in which I’m on stage, where my voice sounds out to an empty auditorium after the show, ghost light on; the smell of marked-out flooring, the sound of my feet on top of the hollow wood, the chains gently clink as I move the curtain. Where I feel at home in my own skin; alone.
Sometimes it is me, just as I sit now, writing my own tale. Composing my own small bit of the telling. It’s not a grand epic, nor a masterpiece. It is me, enjoying the feel of the words as they move through my mind, enjoying the thoughts which[CG2] drive my choices as they appear on the page before me. My favorite punctuation mark is the semi-colon these days. I wish now I had learned to use it with more finesse. It is soothing, this act of telling[CG3] , like floating in warm water, it pulls the noise out of my mind and sends it a way, dispelled into the life I’ve only temporarily left behind.
Or perhaps I’m directing that one piece; that one movie which means so much to me to make. It’s based on my favorite young adult book. I am working with 4 child actors and realize it is equally important to be enamored of each child’s parents as to be in love with their own nature during the casting of the film. It’s a long 3-year haul to get a movie made. I’d better like the whole family unit. There is magic, though, in the ability of an honest child to convey emotion, to bring you on a journey. That is where I focus, where I focus each one of them[CG4] . They, like me, bring life to a life-giving story, perhaps a story that will save a life.
No matter the lifetime, they are all the same. Filled with drive, passion, my insatiable need to bring people from the start, through an experience, to a finish. Even in this life, from which I speak now, I project manage a technical team from beginning, through the creation process, through the performance, to the delivery to audience of something (hopefully) wanted, consumed. I admit, it is not a life-giving story, but at least I recognize the pattern.
The book in my hand was leather bound, one of a set A-Z. I wonder now if they ordered them off the television. How did a family get a set of Encyclopedia Britannica’s anyway? I wonder how much of the knowledge in them is even current – without Wikipedia how is information brought up to date? “Ma-Mi” had a broken spine. I remembered the violence with which it had hit the wall at the bottom of the stairs. Who had I been standing next to, my mother or my sister? Which one of them had thrown the book? Is it just my logical assumption as an adult or do I actually remember damage to the sheetrock? I don’t think either of them had been hurt, but no matter, the damage was already done.
I closed the volume and added it to the Goodwill pile; it felt fantastic. In hindsight, it was one of those things that didn’t need to go. It wasn’t moldy or mildewed. It was so laden with that one act of violence I could not bring myself to leave it in the house; as if all the memories she was keeping around her, in themselves, had given her cancer. If I were back there, in that moment, caught by the momentum of exorcising so many demons, I would do it again.
I know now I have something to say. It is not so much that I need the audience. Like that theatre with the ghost light, it is the telling that keeps me alive. I have a story. Until I tell it I will continue to feel my life pass with ever increasing momentum; unforgiving in pace, oblivious to need, to longing. Am I so afraid of the consequences of human emotion that I will never tell my own true tale?
Notes / Thoughts:Afraid to explore the range of human emotion – trained young by memories made for me: human emotion driving people apart- mom (rage), sister (re/actionary), dad (meek, accepting)
Anger, rage, sadness, happiness, anticipation, anxiety, fear, gregariousness
They don’t come in order –these memories. They do not have to come in order in the book I write either.
[CG1]Cheryl Strayed refers to an author – main character looking back on his house – seeing the life he could have lived if he had made different choices – who is that author? What is that story?
[CG2]That vs which? Research the answer
[CG3]Barry Lopez – Crow and Weasel. Sometimes one needs a story more than food to stay alive.
[CG4]Dicey’s Song