I know what you're thinking, and I ask you to please just let me explain. It will only take a moment, and yes, maybe there is something wrong with me, but... hear me out.
I learned early on that Life ends when grade school begins. Up until that point, you're a being of infinite creativity – you have the potential to be anything, to do anything. You're not a member of society, you're your own unique person. Then you turn six or so and they round you up and put you in a box with a hundred other people “just like you” and they teach you how to be what they want you to be. You learn how to be the governmental definition of a person, and to hell with everything else. But it's not just the stuff they teach you that does you in. It's how they teach you. It's the cycles.
This is how we stop being people – when we start accepting the loops. Doing the same thing every day. Putting the same seven days in a week. Same twelve months in a year. At the worst, you stop for a nap, stop for a break, stop for a summer, before coming back and doing it all again. Over and over and over until the very thought of doing it any other way is extinguished from our minds. Suddenly we have to repeat things. Suddenly there's no such thing as the word “new”. And this is how we die inside. It's legally required suicide.
I knew this, but I couldn't avoid it any better than anyone else. I had to go to school just like everyone had to go, and I had to show up again and again until I turned of an age where I was numb and until that time had passed the only thing that kept me going were the lies. Fictions. Fantasy. Up until middle school ended, I read a thousand books and watched a thousand movies and I played games and simulations until my eyes bled because that was the only way to escape the world that everyone was so determined I would be living in. Because they held that hint of what it was to be really alive.
But in the end even that couldn't sustain me, because again there were those accursed patterns. Everyone was living the same life and so they were sick of it in the same ways and no one understood how to get out, because even the worlds they created were similar and there were all these rules that they had to follow in order to get their art out to the people that needed them and that in itself destroyed their meaning, eliminated that spark that made them more real than the rest of us. Their stories just couldn't sustain me anymore. So I stopped. I gave up. I gave in. I died.
And I was normal until I met her. She was the type of girl who could just blow my mind right out of my skull without a moments notice, this insane, ridiculously optimistic wisp of a thespian, and because she asked me to I went to see her in this play she was in. For all my love of the modern story I'd never been in a theater before, but they had a good script and a fine play and she was an excellent actress so it was all pretty amazing and I was more awake than I had been for ages when I first heard the silence and everything changed forever.
Theater is not that different from any other form of lying that I have endorsed, but there is one thing about it that no other medium has and that is this: in an especially dramatic play, there is a certain point where the energy that has built up in the room has built to a boiling point, and suddenly in the heat of that moment the actors toss their pretend emotions out onto the stage in some powerful exclamation that renders the world speechless. Everyone on the stage becomes suddenly silent, and everyone in the audience holds their breath.
They are holding their breath because suddenly the actors are not actors at all, but almost people. They are almost real people, and the stage around them is almost a real place, and if you look closely you can actually see their phony props acquiring color and depth, just as you can see the real emotion in the eyes of the men and women who have suddenly been brought into this world. Something extraordinary has happened, something that we could only conceive of in fantasies, but everyone knows that this time it is true and they are held still in the rapture of it and you can hear absolutely no noise in a theater crowded with living organisms, all of whom believe in what is on the stage because it is real. And then (and only then) am I real as well, am I as alive as those people on the stage.
I am certain that if we could merely hold that silence, then the transformation would be permanent. The world could be different from what it is now. But I have been attending plays for years after my death and hers, and if there is one other thing that is true about theater it is that there is always, always someone in the room who can't handle the world not being what it was before. They can't live in a world where things don't happen in loops, where the routine and the routine of the routine are broken. They can't be alive for more than moments at a time. And so they shift in their seats, or cough, or stick their hand in a snack, or whisper to their friend in the seat next to them, anything they can do just to break the silence. That beautiful silence!
And for the longest time I could not figure out why, why every time the lie was on the verge of becoming truth that they did this, until I finally realized that it is these people, these dreadful, unoriginal drones, these zombies with beating hearts, who were responsible for it all. These are the people who hold us down, who chain us to the world of the routine with their petty defiance of the impossible.
Those are the people you see here, in this theater I've found for you. As you can see, they're quite incapable of making such noises now. You'll have to pardon the smell - it's taken a long time to collect them all. And I know, I know it's all so very strange, and I know you're scared, and I know it's certainly not what you were planning for tonight, but... but if you could just stand up and do this piece with me, and together we can reach that silence and then – who knows? Maybe they'll be alive for the first time too.
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