With Our Exits and Our Entrances

Take 1
Take 2

Just as before, I stand in half-light that fades into patches of black, script in hand. Behind the curtain all is hushed energy, the tenseness of muscles ready to walk quavering out into the brightness and the sight, the light that focuses all those eyes on them.

The girls fuss silently with their makeup, mouth for me to check their hair for the third fourth time. The boys sit quiet on the wooden casket not yet in use, shoulder to shoulder, sober and noiselessly hysterical in turns. The French mustache is perfectly curled, the case of crumbling cigars lies askew on the table, and the last of the three pocketwatches ticks incessantly to mark the time before it is put inside a pocket as a finishing touch.

This year is different somehow.

There is still the boy who taps backstage, who quakes each time he walks through the curtain. This time around, his words snap the air like firecrackers--hang frozen for a moment, then fade, the most insistent punctuation. Each time he comes off our eyes meet and I nod, smiling. He smiles back usually, a small smile, but once he came back triumphant, laughing unabashedly as he clapped a friend on the back.

He has grown.

Then there are those whose steps on stage this time around are the first scrutinized steps they have ever taken for another's entertainment. They worry, they whisper, they are afraid they'll wilt. One of them, small and birdlike, walks onstage in her finery to shout in Mandarin to the crowd, only to come running back and bury her head in my chest, collapsed in nervous giggling and trembling like a sparrow who's just escaped a hawk.

We are the few who wait in the dark for our chance in the light. We quaver, we throb, we breathe heavy. We are brave, and we are afraid. We exit and we enter at all the right times, we put on a good show and we make the people laugh.

But in the end, the costumes are off, the makeup is rubbed away, and the hair comes down. Who we are was merely borrowed and put on, someone else's voice and face and way of being.

When we leave, we leave with ourselves, those selves with cracks and scars, with buttresses and barricades and we step onto a stage of another sort. Still quavering, still throbbing, still breathing heavy. Still brave, and still afraid.