WINGS

Waiting in the wings.  The make-up is piled on my face.  I hate this feeling.  This half-baked, caked on pregnant feeling right before.  The ropes reach up into the darkness above the stage and all I can think of is the hangman's noose.  The music is playing from the pit and I have this sinking emotion of dread--of how the orchestra and the audience are in cahoots against me.  That they are sharing this marvelous thing and I'm out of the picture and how they're probably perfectly happy without me.

What I need is to get out there...out into the light where the heat from the ancient lamps will cook this pancake on my cheeks and it will rise like a souffle of character--a person whose body I myself will inhabit.  Once that happens I will be set loose into the art of it all.  The music will take me over and use my flesh and my aching lungs for good.

The bird is coaxed from its egg-bound nest against its will by a mother out on a clothes line harping a song, nothing but annoyance, to set to stir a rhythm in her heart that she can't help but answer.  She aches to stay and longs at the same time to be out in the grass, not even knowing what grass is, or even freedom.  She seeks only the chance to make her own way, without the squawking of impatience or of evolutionary design.  I choose to stay here, she says, no matter how unsatisfactory the nest, baking in the heat of the summer, as long as my share is delivered, via direct deposit, of my own account.

The cue approaches.  I can feel the air of anticipation electrify around me.  The stage manager holds a finger to her headphoned ear, knowing what is said there in her ear by rote, but needing to actually hear it nonetheless.  I can feel the steady building of beats off in the distance.  I know that there is a point of light on the horizon that is me re-joining the collective telling of story, the relating of tale--it marches toward me but I know there will be a threshold at which the urgency changes hands--when there is no longer a march toward me as much as carrying forward by me, under my own power, of the narrative; when it is I who provides the impulse.

This is the never ending journey, as old as the earth and the sky, as deep as the deepest ocean.  It suffers not of accountancy, it submits to no audit and to no know crisis of personality.  It is itself.

It is.