My Own Show Is on Tonight

The staircase down leads to the shadow show. There are numerous clocks and pictures with people with no faces on the walls, leading down.

Marilyn kept looking at me, very sideways.

Sometimes we sat with our legs against the walls and our heads on the floor, the shadow show was on the ceiling. I thought that was the most fun of them. But today we all sat straight and looked at the stage.

One thing was for certain. No matter where and how we sat, I'd laugh until I cried.

Beside me sat two students I did not recognize despite spending all of my days and nights here.

I didn't bother to look at faces except my own in the mirror.

I knew what I looked like, but every time, my features seemed abstract.

Everything about this school was abstract. The high ceilings, the chairs, and how your spine would be left behind on them. Your thoughts on paper that were no longer your own.

Yours were erased. Empty jar, waiting to be filled back up with tonight’s show. Our secret gathering.

The stage rose, wooden beams creaking. The curtain came loose and fell to the floor, and someone invisible whisked it behind the walls.

It cracked a smile on our faces.

The lights dimmed above us, and I could no longer see the students' faces. I was alone here.

Maybe a bit frightened, but less than I was the entire day.

The spotlight was on the stage, and a group of people appeared on the wall.

They lay in a circle, feet towards the one in the middle.

How they created this escaped me.

Some nights I spent wondering, creating assumptions. Who was doing this and how?

But that meant choosing my own intrigue, studying what I chose, over preparing for the next day's lecture.

And they could always tell. I'd always be punished. So I decided I'd no longer wonder.

I was thinking all of that to myself, and then the shadow figure in the middle spun around; it'd been lying on its face before.

It had a mask, and the way it turned around was very human, not like an inanimate object.

I recognized her immediately. My own face. On its mask.

It was wrong.

I looked around, and they all looked at me with a friendly smile.

These forms of people become a spiral and then fracture into fragments, and the projection shows me each of them.

I feel it very closely, somewhere in my bones or the way blood pumps into my veins. I don't think anything has felt so familiar to me. With this surging passion, it brings me agony.

To the shadow of me in the middle, multiple shadows of hands appear, all pointing their finger at me. Or her.

But me… I think.

And there's laughter, a bit shrill and unsettling, bouncing off the walls and off of me. It binds me to my chair in cold sweat. I think it's the students laughing around me, the audience. But I don't dare look, I'm too scared, so I sit with my tights snug and damp against my skin.

I'm being jeered and mocked. Sometimes I wonder if it's just me, no one really cares about me or my work.

But now I see that it's been true all along. It is about me.

The fingers go away, but it's not over.

Shadow me stands on the edge of something so thin.

She's been stupid to even step on it; it's a sure demise.

I can feel the desperation claw at me, it's once more in my chest and stomach. It goes up to my throat with its sharp grip.

I feel like throwing up, losing all sense. At least that's what I'd want to do, hoping that would come to me as relief. My body wouldn't feel so heavy on this thin piece of paper I've been standing on.

The shadow me slips and no matter how much she tries to get back onto the surface, it betrays her and dips to let her go.

I don't like it, and I'm so scared to see her fall.

I know that no matter how much I try or what I do, I will always fail. Fail them, myself, my past, and future.

I am not proud of myself.

The scene shifts, the shadow with the mask, eyes drawn with a sharpie stands on her arms. Feet up in the air and nose to the floor. The clock above her strikes midnight, but there's no scare. It goes to one in the morning agonizingly slowly, I think I've really sat here for an hour. It goes on like that until six in the morning, there is more light on her shadow body, and it's the sun, the morning.

I am so exhausted, but how could I sleep when nothing is ever done, when my fingers ache for a pen and my heart for praise that never comes?

They had left me all alone in this room, dense with feelings.

But I felt the weight of them on my knees and thighs. I’d bear it. Keeping the balance, relying on me as their footrest.

With light on their fingertips, they reach for the ceiling.

And they succeed. I couldn’t. But I will watch them and silently crave. Crave, yearn.

Give me another word to think about.

I want to close my eyes. I don’t want to look at it anymore.

I feel discomfort in my body that grows into silent agony.

I don’t understand where I am anymore. I don’t feel the chair. The floor beneath me. The air in my lungs.

The skin and my nails.

But there are fingers on me that I don't recognize, but just as mean as when I hold myself.

Rude on my steel body.

My typewriter body.

I am just an asset on their desk. I will write whatever you want. Stay up however long you want. I will speak only the way you want.

This is how, I remember, I think the show ends, but I still see the continuation.

The shadows are back on the wall, everything is wonderful. They're all around me again, laughing and happy. That's what we came for: laughter and happiness, a moment away from our routine that has bled into a monstrosity I couldn't describe. I hate it, and I hate their laughter.

The shadow drops, and the sound is disgusting; it drives right through me, and tears bite my eyes. The shadow lies on the floor unmoving, and the crowd goes past it. Again, the movements of the shadows are so easy and human. I don't think it's anyone's fingers doing it, or someone capable of walking their paper figure like this. I don't know what this is.

There's a person or a shadow, and they're dead on the stage, and I fled because I didn't want to remember.

Would you? Seeing that? When they drop from the heights of a rooftop, I think they're no longer human halfway down. You take a step, and you're already somewhere else, and you're okay with it. I don't want to be okay with it.

So I flee.

If only I had the time to think about it, understand it.

I asked again… Where did this tradition come from?

Who’s at fault? Who has looked so closely at me to create this, and who stands behind the curtain?

There was no response.

But I had to know. Maybe there were things I could do in secret to understand it from the outside.

Maybe. Maybe something lived there. Something that ate my fear right up. Or many little things that scurried in my room at night when I finally fell asleep and read me like a piece of paper.

So I listened for them with my cheek against the door to the show that only opened when it was time.

I listened for hours that next day.

I had been away the entire day, and I had lost all sense of fear for the consequences of forgetting to attend the lessons.

The students came flooding in when it had grown late, and I stopped Marilyn. I tugged her arm, and she listened, but she wasn’t my friend. Not entirely. I don’t think anyone here had a friend. This is when I noticed how scared and pale she looked. Sharp cheekbones and blue circles under her eyes, it looked even worse in the nightfall, with the sparse lighting in the corridor. I noticed how her thin wrist tried to wrestle free.

I let go. I knew she’d understand. Eventually.

And turn around.

By then, I will have it all understood and figured out.

The door stayed open for me when the last student walked inside, and the red light spilled onto my shoes, but I turned away. I didn’t want the laughter anymore.

But there, waiting for me was something much worse than the shadow show.

Does it amuse you, too, the thought that I had a choice?