Ecstasy of the Ghosts I’ve Been
On the stage, I am home.
Ironically, existential dread propelled onto the stage.
I worry at the edge of tomorrow that I will be done one day. Time does not care. Time is the mom who always breathes down my neck. Time is what I fear the most. Carried past street lights like time passing by, I cannot keep pace with the shadows of change. My brain doesn’t stop thinking. It keeps going. I am held captive.
What if I am locked away in my mind’s pit, and the only guards are my own thoughts? What if I am crazy? The only things I trust are birth, death, and sometimes gravity. I cannot trust what I see, says the visual therapist who dings me when I read a word wrong. I will never be able to drive myself. In this regard, my brain is my Achilles heel. I lost this particular genetic lottery.
Desperate to hush my inner voice, up the cement stairs, through the old wooden doors, and down the dark arts corridor I went. The heavy navy drapes that frame the black stage do little to muffle the sound of a pounding heart. I thought the stage was rejecting me, telling me we weren’t meant to be. The silence seemed deafening and the darkness all consuming. But from silence and darkness can rise beauty and light.
Now, when my feet are planted on that elevated ground under those lights, I can be anywhere in the universe of my imagination. Something is magical about the countdown. With each passing minute, the adrenaline drains the blood numb from my hands and rushes into my legs. My heartbeat thrums in my ears. As I exhale, I make my way out of my body, slipping out through my nostrils. A blank canvas waiting to bloom vivid, I await in the colorless emptiness.
My mind and the minds of all those around me align. We are ready. But it is not until I feel the lights on my back, warming every inch of my skin, until the adrenaline suffuses every crack in my shattered glass veins, until I am not myself that I am home. I have never been more myself than when I am someone else. The stage is home to everyone I have ever been. I see versions of myself ghosting around the corners on the stage, inviting me to try them on again, be them for another day. Every breath onstage is one that is not mine, one that belongs to an echo of me floating in another dimension, waiting to be used again. I hear laughter and whispers of the ghosts of who I have been, beckoning me to lose myself in them. I am surrounded always by those I love.
I am spell stopped, heart racing, mind reeling, shiveringly alive. This place, suspended in time, is my home - the place where the palpitations in my chest do not matter; where despair ceases to be; where there is no sense of right and wrong; where I can be. Gravity holds down my body only. My mind soars five billion kilometers in outer space. It dances in the galaxy, floating in Orion’s belt, leaping through Jupiter’s moons. This is the stuff of ecstasy.
Onstage, I paint pictures with my lips, letting words come alive in my mouth. As if they have a mind of their own, they barrel their way out of my lips. Like the vanishing honey, I savor every one of them, knowing they are limited.
For the bone-crushing whip of reality hits me out of the sky, snatches me out of the stratosphere, and smacks me onto the ground that meets me too quickly. Cruelly, far too quickly. I land cold on my back. The walls close in. My body expels more oxygen than I can possibly replace. I begin drowning in my fear. It is a nightmare to be afraid of my own mind. Those thoughts that had been shoved to some far corner of my mind, latched in a locked box, are now free. They spread like icy fire. And this mind spreads through my body like a fast-progressing cancer.
The kaleidoscope of colors shatter around me, making butterfly cuts on my body. Drips of happiness seep out. I know of hope only by its presence in some distant memory, by the hollow in my being.
I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to run. I want to leave.
Turn it off. Turn off! Turn off this incessant harping in my brain.
Fade out.
From a distance fades in the sound of muffled applause. It’s disorienting, discomfiting, discombobulating. Not until it sweeps me offstage do I register its source. My throat clamps shut and the water works begin. With no air, not one electrical impulse crosses the synapses of thought. Emptied. Shut eye.
When my eyes open to light again, I sigh, homesick already all over again.