Love: The Play

We begin with a tree.

The paper mache behemoth stands center stage. The light shines directly on its imperfect patchwork, each strip having been laid on by a volunteer of the community. How high does it go? the audience wonders. We hope it reaches Heaven.

I am beneath it. I am confused.

We, as the audience, we just see a girl. We do not know her yet. We are waiting to see her plans, her motivations. What arc will she take? We have no way of knowing. We just like to guess.

I don’t like to guess much, and I wish we didn’t. I find myself guessing so often.

We want to see her stand up, so she does. Finally! After so long of a wait, she does. We see how tiny she is against the backdrop of our community tree. What a funny little creature, in her funny white dress.

I never asked to be here. I want to run backstage.

And how foolish she is to try such a thing. The dashing and handsome local heartthrob sweeps her off her feet. We gasp. Many of us faint. God, is he dressed to the nines! The costume director put in good work with this one. The suit hugs him in all the right places, accentuating his perfect features. And that shade of black! How do you even find a shade like that?

“Let go of me!” I yell.

We hear no such thing. She is grateful to be picked up by him, as she should be. “My love!” she croons as she runs delicate fingers across his broad chest. A pink spotlight finds its way across the stage.

Do I know beauty? How long have I run from those like him? I feel weightless in his arms. I am pink. He is pink. Isn’t that good?

Where is the real world? How closely can we replicate its beauties and complexities in our theatre? We, as the audience, require an exaggeration of the facts. When we are sitting so far away, how else can we feel the same emotions, feel a part of the scene? Their facial expressions must be sculpted by our hands, and they must linger there so we can admire our work.

His face, outlined in that fuzzy glow, sculpted by the gods themselves, pulled by strings into a loving grin, is like sour candy to my eyes. “Let’s go,” he says, voice soft as melted marshmallow. The people below us, the ones that stay lurking in the corner of my eye, hoot and holler in a frenzied fuss.

“Go where?” the girl asks. We know that this is her line, but we also sense a hint of emotion, perhaps contempt. We do not appreciate any sort of subtexts being crammed behind our carefully crafted lines.

I look up at him, into his soft oval eyes, blinded by the ring of light behind him. I expect an answer. His lips twitch ever so subtly, and I wait for his words to trickle down toward my waiting ears. However, he just chuckles. He laughs.

Ha ha ha. That's all I have to carry me. A shit-eating grin and a neck cocked to the side, flashing intermittently through visions of hanging faces with mouths trapped in perfect O's floating through a cloud of darkness. They fly at me, eat me whole, until I'm wrapped in his arms once again, standing outside on Lacy's front porch.

"You having fun?" he asks, grin still plastered across his cheeks, face flushed, holding a bottle of cheap beer in his right hand. His grin cuts deeper into his skin as he tilts the bottle up against my parted lips.

"No," I whisper, staring into the depths of the hole in its neck, watching the liquid waste slosh here and there.

“Suit yourself,” he concedes, and sets me down on the porch railing. With hand now free, he sucks the drink down like a man dying of thirst.

But he is not dying of thirst. He is as well-off as ever, dressed in his tight-fitting jeans and authentic leather jacket (never to be confused as fake or thrifted). His bulging muscles lurk quietly under the surface of it all, taking pity on those that are less endowed, but just for the night.

He dragged me here nearly three hours prior. I had to deal with Lacy’s fake smiles and lingering gazes the whole time. The girl watches me like a hawk, and watches him like he’s a good show on television. “You want a drink?” she kept asking as I sat aloof on the floral printed couch in her absent parents’ living room.

“No, I’m okay,” I kept insisting. 

I could watch dumb teenagers make fools of themselves sober with no problem. They talked confidence but stood like dying flowers and had eyes that never stopped searching for a crutch to hold onto. Their only solace was losing themselves in the shifting colored strobe lights that tore through the empty spaces in the room.

And he is their ideal model. I know this as I look at him now, standing on that porch, downing his fifth drink that night. He has absorbed all of their mentalities and tendencies, studied the art of being cool and made himself the very definition of the word. He smiles once more as he brings the bottle down from his lips, with a merry twinkle in his eyes.

I, tracking the path of that twinkle, find that his gaze is aimed across the lawn at a pretty girl named Lacy. Lacy, whose house this is. Lacy who wears dresses just for show and keeps her harem of fellows aimed at anyone who dares cross her. 

She stands there, in the overgrown grasses, framed by a full moon that lends an ethereal quality to her natural beauty. She holds two bottles of beer, presumably for the boys that stand chatting in the driveway. Quietly, a gust of wind floats by and carries the hem of her dress for just a moment. Her eyes are glued to him, and always have been.

I turn back. He never looked away. He merely stands there, transfixed. 

When his gaze finds mine again, he is as artificially charming as ever. “What? You ready to go or something?” he questions. “I can take you to my place.”

His place.

We, the audience, are glued to our seats. What a wonder it would be to experience a night with him, if only second-hand. We would do anything for a chance like this. We would deny ourselves, throw our bodies into molten lava for just one night with him. This is the part we wait for. We wait for the girl to be smart, to choose what is right.

I, still trapped on this stage, feel a sudden tug on my torso. I look down to see that I have been strapped into a harness. I don’t know when. He is still waiting for his answer, and so am I.

Do it, girl. Say the line.

He looks down at me with eyes that know the answer. I know the answer, too. I’ve known from the moment that I met him that I’d do anything he says—that I am the biggest fool of them all.

“I w-,” we hear her say. But all too suddenly she is violently yanked from the stage, torn from her beautiful scene. We gasp in shock, and the heartthrob sinks to his knees, bellowing at the pain of losing her.

I float far above him, far enough to be afraid. I see him down there, a tiny ant, shouting, “Come back, my love!” My legs and arms dangle like useless slabs of meat from my torso. I am pulled up farther and farther still until I reach the leaves of the tree, seemingly hundreds of meters above anything the audience would have been able to witness. And I am pulled and pulled even more and I see the tree’s leaves are dying. And once again I am yanked more until I find myself in a strange network of rafters and see that the person on the other end of the rope is myself.

“Hello,” I say.

And far below, he stands once more for his final line:

“End scene.”