The Lost Show

I watched you stand in the middle of the empty theater, red seats hugging the corners of the memory, crying. You were still in the dress from the show but the dark red didn't look as good as it did on the stage. It fell into the background of red, red, red.

There was a light coming through the massive windows lining both sides of the room, often blocked like you were to keep the darkness inside and the light outside. They were open this time though and the light came in. It caught your tears and made them look like gold on your cheeks.

It was probably just some streetlight but it made you look beautiful anyway.

You weren't, generally.

Pretty, that is. You weren't a pretty person.

All your words were sharp and caustic. They burned through the people that wanted to help. Dealing with you was like sticking an arm into a thorned snake pit. I hated it. I hated you. The people who stuck their neck out for you got their heads chopped off. Sometimes I think that's what you wanted, to leave them all with a memory that would haunt them because the truth of it is that no one cares unless they're injured, right?

Maybe.

You never cut my neck. You never spat at me. You never turned any of the vitriol towards me and I was fine keeping it that way. Distance wasn't something I was ever afraid of, not then at least.

I think about that night often, did you know that?

You stood like a ghost, ready to haunt the theater and full to bursting with woe. I'd never noticed before but it was painfully obvious. The shadows on your throat, the faint speckling of bruises under your concealer, the old blood stuck under your nails, it was a map to a treasure that was nothing more than a smooth poison.

It was so late and you were so unbothered.

I saw you every day for six years, save the two months in the middle of every summer, and I never saw you like this. All the fight, all the attitude, all the sharp edges...were just gone. You were soft. There was a vulnerability in your soul that crackled in the air like hoar frost. Pieces of me were caught in the freeze and soon feathery ice covered my mask and turned me into a fool.

This was a masquerade.

This whole time, living was a masquerade for you and I was the idiot thinking it was real. I didn't even know I had a mask until it froze, cracked, and fell.

Your tears made me cry.

I didn't realize at first, but long lines of similarly shimmering tears tracked down my cheek, rolled down my neck, and gathered in the collar of an old shirt that stopped looking good on me two years ago.

I'm sorry that didn't change anything.

If there was any justice, it would have.

It was late. Hours after the play started and a couple after it ended. Everyone had gone home. The line of cars picking people up, rushing out, and impatiently waiting had all cycled through leaving nothing but oil stains and the faintest hint of exhaust. I was only back because I was stupid enough to forget it.

It was my fault for forgetting it in the first place. My fault I saw this at all.

Tucked in the back, it sat untouched on the top shelf of a podium I had called home for hours that night. I welcomed people. Kept the doors closed. I watched you dance. Watched you laugh. Watched you long for something you couldn't have. And I thought it was all part of the show.

The lights came on and I said goodbye to everyone, only vaguely remembering their faces. I didn't have a mind for that kind of thing. Names, oh yeah. Feelings, definitely. But faces? Faces were lost to me.

Until I saw your private performance. I'll never forget your face now. It's been burned into my memory. You melted me down and forged me into something new, something that had a brand of your face pressed into it.

I slid in quietly, hoping not to bother the janitor, but he wasn't the one in the auditorium. Sometimes I still wonder if he even went in there that night or if he saw you and turned tail.

There wasn't normally enough courage in me to let the world guide me but you were pretty that night when you stood in the middle of that theater, performing some silent soliloquy to the invisible audience, just like the writer intended. You were pretty when you contemplated to be or not to be.

So I stood at the podium in the back and watched.

I watched as your hands trembled at your side. I watched as you stood unmoving for long stretches of time, gazing vacantly first at the stage and then at the window where the light fell through. You didn't move at all and the red carpet beneath your feet seemed to swallow you whole. I watched for who knows how long, enraptured by the grief and desperation rolling from you.

You were a siren, wailing an alluring song of sorrow.

The agony dripped off you. It poisoned the air and I couldn't help but take a hit. Little cracks moved in jagged lines like lightning through my soul. The solid glass of my dreams shattered but the diamond dust raining down was a beautiful replacement.

I was hungry for the connection you offered. There was an ache to your posture, a plea in the golden tears on your cheeks. I wanted to respond. Every molecule of me screamed to walk the plank and step into your limelight and touch you.

There was a table set for two but I didn't take the seat.

I think I'm losing my mind now.

A handful of doctors have thrown words like trauma around but they don't understand. No one would. Only your ghost. And I haven't stepped foot in that theater since you slit your throat because I saw you.

I saw you.

I was the last one who did.

Maybe I was the first too and that would make my abandonment a crime worthy of death, wouldn't it?

I'm sitting at that table now, waiting for someone else to take a seat.

I'm sitting in my sorrow. Stewing in the boiling heat of my grief. I saw your last show and I didn't think to hand you a rose. I wasn't willing to shell out a portion of my soul to save you from drowning in your golden tears and now I'm dead on my feet. A shell of a man.

A character in a lost show.