We All Have Our Walls

We all have our walls. I know I do. I pace in place nervously, hemmed in by my four walls. It can be maddening, because of the isolation. Too much protection from the world does just that.

I wonder how strong these walls are. Is any one wall stronger than the other? I check the corners above me for corner braces or bent rebar. There are none. My prison is fallible. It can be dismantled. But I must reconsider, for was there not a reason for it?

To keep me in? Or, alternatively, to keep certain things out?

I go knocking on each wall to see if any one sounds hollower than the other. I choose one for its hollow sound and find a sweet (sour?) spot that fails to resonate for me despite my seductive percussion.

This is the wall. This is the one I will make fall first.

I kick it down and it swoops flat onto the ground on its other side, discharging dust and microscopic debris as it does. I look through where that first wall once stood and on the other side is a stage.

And dropping my one wall reveals my audience.

They are laughing.

With me? At me? Are my life’s missteps clumsy and funny? I tend to think them tragic. But the show must go on!

I choose the wall opposite to the first and push it over. It is easy, but what ensues is not—opposites, conflicts, and paradoxes can now blow through, which demand that I choose, lest get blown away. The audience stops laughing. There’s a hush of anticipation from them.

I don’t like choosing. Especially things that are important. What director blocked this stage play? Who was in charge of continuity? Am I in an act or an entr’acte? The symphonics swell from the orchestra pit below. Their sounds are flipping back and forth from melodious to discordant as I consider which way to address the opposites blowing through. Some of the audience begin leaving.

How rude!

A third wall drops, leaving me only one remaining, behind which to hide. But this is an illusion, for I stand naked in a theater-in-the-round. My life, thus, has been a square peg in a round hole, where force is worthless. Where farce is not.

The fourth wall follows, and if these walls could talk…but they no longer can. What things these walls have heard are no longer secretive.

Everything about me has been exposed. For better or for worse.

What have I done? What have I wrought!

I stare the audience down and a lone, slow clap begins. It picks up steam and soon finds purchase with those remaining. Those who left early will regret their impudence. Because there’s a moral here:

Whether dropping my walls makes me a star or a flop, those who let no walls drop are doomed to pace relentlessly, getting nowhere, within windowless, door-less constraints, going nowhere.

This message is not lost on the audience, so I take a bow…to a standing ovation. Someone, somewhere in the throng hollers, “Encore!”

But I’m all out of walls.