Bright Ones

Haunting those compelled to a life of scripts, rehearsals, designs and illusions persists the adage, “If you can do anything else and be happy, do it.” This imperative stands as a warning, a plea, to chase one’s bliss in a more determinable, more secure elsewhere, because theatre too often takes even hope itself from the hopeful souls pursuing this craft. Yet, this counsel only echoes from those already walking this forewarned path, from those weathered figures chorusing, “Turn back, turn back, bright ones, for this craft burns out such light.” But an underlying message courses quietly, fiercely:

“Unless that light can burn only here.”

Master Lego Builder

Have you ever heard an infant cry?

Tiny torso rapidly and fully concaving and convexing.

For hours.

Pumping one long, unbroken wail. Perfect breath control with the abdominal support and unconstrained throat that public speakers, actors, and singers pay thousands of dollars to relearn what they once did unconsciously.

I try.

Fill the deepest parts of my lungs,

and send out a rising amplitude of vibrations ricocheting off rushing air molecules,

Vocal cords splinter.

The release too spontaneous, too raw, too volitionally purposeless. Ten seconds of abandon and for the next two days, shards scrape against shards, painful and tight, producing harsh speech. Nine years of theatre training could not protect me, could not remind or re-teach me.

I, probably when learning to sleep in darkness and to tinker in dayness, began to manage life. To fracture the continuum of time into decades, years, weeks, milliseconds. To refashion an intact whole into, not a stream of moments, but crystallized building blocks of tiny arrows pointing towards the next Big Life Goal, never a circle complete in itself as though I were the Master Builder of my own Lego world.

Give a Lego to an infant and she’ll put it in her mouth, using the most sensitive part of her body to touch a small piece of this world. A little part, building on top of, beside, underneath, behind and two feet away from other little parts, all assembling this Big World with never space between. Even that is filled with air molecules or radiation or carcinogens or memory or maybe some residue of grace. Then gum to edge, plastic to soft, wet pinkness, she’ll throw it, having tasted it and moved on.

Being decades removed from infanthood, this postulation, like my Lego world, could be nothing but a Romantic construct. For I, just as much as the next person, project ideals onto the places I cannot return. Because then there exists a time when I was good, a time when I could not have done any better than what cannot be undone. And no one can tell me differently. Because they, too, cannot remember. Being so distant and universally forgotten, these ideals repose safe from memory.

Now, when I scream, I break things. In abandon, I break. And there was a time when I didn’t, a time when I could scream, unbroken, for hours. Sometimes, it feels good to taste the wreckage.

An acquaintance once told me that his heart had to break for it to open.

Maybe it’s something like that.

[Image Source]

Contact/ Needy Whores

During sophomore spring exams, I received a free 15-minute massage from my college’s health services. Being touched for those 15 minutes remains the longest contact with a human being I hold in memory. I never received her name.

I’ve read that a human being’s only two instincts are to cry and to suckle. We begin as parasites and then our only two compulsions are to demand attention and to quaff body fluids. Basically, we are born needy whores, screaming for warm boob in our mouths, arms cradling our bodies, and hands wiping shit off our butts.

Then we regulate, learning to do for ourselves. And we learn to do for ourselves and then regulate.

We learn how to hold a bottle, to walk, to control our bowels. Crying becomes a herald for punishment, for a scathing word and a hot hand instead of a soothing in gentle arms. Because you know better. Your emotional discernment has matured past such demonstration. But your instincts haven’t matured. Regulated, they carrying on through asphyxiation.

Perhaps that is why I cannot always remember faces or voices, but I can instantly feel against me the body of every person I’ve ever hugged. Faces and voices require moments to construct with the wariness of fiction’s brush adding a curve to a cheek or a tilt to a laugh. But hugs, so immediate and so tangible that fiction has no time to uncap its pen, envelop me instantly.

I feel their hug. I feel myself in their hug, against my chest, my stomach, my cheek, my shoulders, inside my arms. I feel their warmth, their closeness. Their hair, skin, bones, muscles beneath skin. Palm against back. Chin against collarbone. Breath against fabric. Beating chest against beating chest. Sensations so exact I could peel away their epidermis and still know them by holding their anatomy to mine.

Sometimes I wish I were a dog so I could walk up to people and feel their hands all over my body.

Sometimes I wish I were a masseuse so I could touch people for an unbroken 15 minutes.

Sometimes I wish I were pregnant so I could always be holding someone.

Sometimes my chest feels like it will split open because even air would be more filling than this need for contact. I brace my arms around myself, fingers digging beneath shoulder blades, face buried into elbows.

Tighter.

Tighter.

[Image Source]