Today Might be a Good Day to Say Something

Two people have to tell each other, “I love you.” They can only speak of potatoes, and they can never use the word “love.” This was a creative writing assignment. It was an exercise in subtext, in conveying without explicitly stating, in finding that palpable dusk where art’s grace resides.

But what is grace in art is fear, avoidance, sidestepping, and in-articulation in life, a reality that became very clear while writing a 25-minute, naturalistic one act for my playwriting class. Rarely do we say anything outright; we have euphemisms for that. And rarer still do we say the words that we want most to scream. These are the words of that first “I love you” or “I hate you.” These are the words of confessions. These are the words that live in the vein attaching our heart to our tongue that we do not utter aloud, even to ourselves. Instead, we go around them, under them, over them, but so rarely do we go through them. Because these are the words we cannot retract and from which we cannot turn back. So until push comes to mighty shove, we keep these words buried, no matter how fiercely they burn. We know we can live with them; we have been living with them all along. What we do not know is if we can live with the undetermined version of the life they will create.

When we finally say these words, it is not because we want to; it is because we have to. A wise woman, my Mother, once told me, “You will never act until you can no longer live with the way things are.” When it comes to life’s pivotal lines, we choose to live with them, burying the words day after day, no matter how madding or painful that burying may be, refusing to act until some external force acts upon us, pushing us to the point where the fear of not saying those words overrides the fear of releasing them. The classic external force is the plane pulling away from the terminal and the lover running to catch her love at the last minute to say the three words that she has wanted to say instead of all the words she has said in their place.

Plays can only bear the weight of a few, if not just one, of these pivotal lines, because on stage, as in life, these lines must be earned or else they fall flat, totally ineffective except for a physical cringe or a roll of the eyes from the audience. Earning these lines takes time, requiring a play to build enough pressure to crack the character, force out the line and then to bear the weight of the line once it lands.

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