Intermission
This dream, what was it?
Even as the truth, reflected in myself, stared me down and basically called ‘one outs,’ on my fragile grip on reality, I couldn’t see it. It was being played out night after night, and the meaning was still just something I couldn’t swallow, let alone accept.
But yet, I knew it, and ever since the first night when I had that dream—I was four if I recall correctly, but back then it was a lot more murky and watered down, but still even then, I knew the truth, but denial seemed safer.
The dream was a tapestry of a lie, with hidden truths woven into its fabric, buried so deep that they would never be found. But they were there. And I knew they were there.
How did I know this?
Because it was my true self who had woven those truths deep into my tapestry of a lie.
In a sense, I was ignorant—no, not ignorant, just afraid.
It’s the epiphany no one wants to have.
For a moment after the dream, in the insignificant sliver of immeasurable time between the dream, and the grip of reality on my shoulders dragging me back with as much force as needed, I sat alone at the lake, and I saw something. . . something that could make sense of the chaos.
I knew what it was, it was the answer—the solution—to my existence.
I was so close; it was just out of my grasp. The murkiness still obscured its knowledge, but if I could just stretch my fingers just a centimetre more, I’d have a grasp on the meaning of it all. I willed myself with everything I had, but my conviction fell agonizingly short. Something kept me from stretching that little bit further.
That something I believed and still believe was fear.
And then, as a cruel testament to irony, just as I edged towards the truth, my mind roared into action and reality severed me from the truth and reinforced a lie—the lie that I had started; A lie that you may know as ‘life.’ Or at least, I knew it as a lie. Rather I knew it as a Shakespearian tragedy, simply just a clever construction from a clever mind.
Life, to me, was a play and I was just an understudy, my true self—the reflection that knew the truth—was the star. But no one could find her, it seemed, just before the curtain was about to rose, she fled the building. She was just another victim of the dreaded stage-fright, and I was a last minute, desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures replacement that had to learn all her lines and scenes in a day.
And her glass slipper was an imposter—a stunt double version of herself—that stunt double, well that was my role in this tragedy.
So welcome to the travesty, and welcome to the show.
What did you think of the first act?
Hold your applause, hold your applause, the curtain just rose, and our story—my story—has only just begun.
