An Emotional Play

Date: 12/18/2019

I am backstage, waiting for a play to start. I have been in this play before- it feels familiar.. almost comforting. The different characters are the different emotions of an experience. I am guilt/anger. There are three others. We write on the backstage walls with thick chalk. The audience, entering from a door backstage, sees this happen as they pass through to take their seats. We go out onto the stage, spaced out. Classical music plays as we talk over one another in emotional soliloquies. I am crying, offering myself to the audience in place of Her. The music stops. One at a time we launch into short monologues. We form a line. I cannot look at the audience. I cannot look at my peers. A gentle feeling trying to keep it all together goes to get a thick black Sharpie marker. He returns to kneel at my left. He wants to use it to craft and draw Her. I want to carve my arm. We fight over it, and I win, drawing a large 'A' on my wrist, a line above and below. As I finish the last line, he stops struggling. We make eye contact. He draws a line below, and the rest of us fall to the ground. He finishes the box around the A, sobbing. "Alice."