This production

This happened weeks ago.

Being near to winter, everything was already darkening by the time I walked over to the theater to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even with the sun down, it was warm for November. My friends ______ and ___ were waiting inside the lobby when I stepped in. Since we already had our tickets, we headed past the double doors and toward the ushers.

Taped on the outside of the doors was a sign:

 Caution: There will be fog machines, black lights, and flying in this production.

I didn’t think anything of that until much later after the show, after we’d sat and watched the painted fairies swing gracefully from their fly-lines and the hapless Athenians stumble through forest gel-shadows. Theatre productions always aggravate that jealous, “what-if” cluster of neurons that seems to exist solely to project reel after reel of past high school shows inside my head, reminding me of the time when I’d wanted nothing more than to cake my face with base every night and set my rhythms to stage direction. That is long gone and isn't. I've always excelled at rationalizations. I’d given up theatre partly because at the time I’d just started rebuilding who I was; I didn’t want to make a career of pretending to be other people. 

I realize, now, how unavoidable that is, no matter which direction I would have taken.

The worst part of living is killing what could have been. Logically, I realize I cannot know everything, but I can’t stand not knowing. Who would I have been if I’d gone to art school? medical school? if I’d majored in neuroscience instead of English? I wish there was a book--a Facebook, even, given this day and age--that I could read to discover the life of each person I could have become. Not to change who I am now, but just to know. 

All I can do is think back to the strange girl who, just months ago, ran with _____ in the rain at one in the morning because it was thundering and spring was coming. Or the girl from weeks ago who'd sat in a hospital waiting room. Those girls are divided like time zones; I'm hours away. 

If that often-quoted line of Shakespeare’s is true and "all the world's a stage," then this sign should be taped to its doors:

Caution: There will be fog machines, black lights, and flying in this production.

(You will lose yourself.  

There will be times when you can feel the cool carcass of a cloud dissolving on your cheek but cannot see your living hands in front of you; you will worry that the sky might have limits after all since here you are, wrapped up in and walking through it. You will wonder if it is better to wait or run through. You will wonder which one will smother you. 

When the sun burns down, you will ache for ultraviolet, to see all the hidden fluorescent colors; when it happens, you will see the white burn like a sheet of snow in violet winter. You will notice teeth. You will notice fingernails. You will rush to a mirror to see if you glow as white and sharp as your neighbor. You will, and you won't. There will be stains you will no longer be able to ignore--on you and others. It will become too much.

And you will fly, or appear to. You will feel triumph. You will close your eyes and move your body like a bird’s, feel the hollow, musical lightness in your bones like someone’s sucked the marrow from them and hung them on a front porch to sound like windchimes.

You will feel the fly wires tug at your heavy body and pull you back to the ground. There will be nothing like it again until it happens again. 

And it will, but it won't. Not to the same person.

You will lose yourself.)