For All The Tanning Salons in Texas

While I'm not intending to be fractious (ha! today's Word of The Day), I need to find the answers to end a period of uncertainty which is strange, bitter and too inconspicuous and covered-up for my own liking. You probably don't get what I mean. But sometimes I feel deprived of information from what's going on around me, and yet I'm expected to understand and empathize with their own little problems as if I was gifted with the supreme power to infer and assume things one-dimensionally from only cryptic remarks and tableaus that frame the scenes. As if I might, perhaps, be telepathic enough to know. As if I wouldn't become a too over-assuming and presumptious gossip after being conditioned to lead a social life of playing guessing while being withheld from the truth.

So I sit in the audience, while yet still having some sort of emotional involvement with the characters and their passion, desires, worries, doubts, etc. and being a sort of catalyst in the process. From the velour of the cushioned seats, I'm tied up with their existence, and at times, happy to be dragged along with the curtains that close, disporting myself at the splintered edges that run across the stage, becoming part of the tableau, finally understanding the plot when things come round full-circle, feeling the melange of adreneline, tears and clamminess from nervous palms swirl around, circumventing around the intangible, even though the secretions are not mine.

Then I find myself trapped in the chasm bordering on despotism wondering why one would wish so much to become one of them. Wide-eyed, I stare back at the audience; eyelids clamped tightly shut, I decide to fade back into the dusty maroon of the velvet curtains. The spotlights become the judgemental eyes of societal circles, and I turn to my right to see raw emotions left undisturbed, caked with rouge, foundation and mascara to form a mask that becomes hard and protective—a sort of inner sanctum in the midst of faked, forced feelings. Lights shine on but they can't hide in the curtains. I become the onlooker, progressing to become the mimes in the background in faded light, to become fearful of more; how funny it becomes now. The scriptwriter decides to be his own character, the hand that hovers over these puppets becomes weary of his own creations.

(Damn it. Go figure!)