Glitter, Failure, and the High School Experience

Stage. Or, a Brief Autobiography

I have never been alone here before.

It is the same as always. There is the warm yellow light, the black-worn-charcoal flooring. The red seats watch me from the audience, waiting.

The whole place is waiting, really. The air is tinged with motes of sawdust from many struck sets. Is tense, a hundred thousand exhales of wonder, a million stunned intakes of breath. The remembered sighing and drilling and singing and hearts pouring out like yolk from a freshly poached egg, and the stage waits.

And I wait with it, until I can look out at the audience and they want to see me.

I think somehow that I have been waiting all my life.

Because my life is measured in daylights and sunsets and cans of Coke Zero, and in moments on the stage, and in red velvet chairs with their breath hanging pale blue in the air.

The stage and I wait together. It is very quiet.

I breathe in the dust and hot light, and think that this is how the world must have begun.