The Corpse and Me .. (2)

I had a theatre group in the small town where I grew up, it started as an alternative to the daily nothingness we always felt. I never loved theatre, and writing was something I knew was beyond my caliber, the only thing I thought I could do was try telling the stories I have seen around me, camouflaging them as stories of other men of other times. So, the retired revolutionary who fled from the battle ground leaving behind his pregnant girlfriend or the boy of 21years who committed suicide just because he thought his utter existence carries no meaning to him, are all in me. I still remember the days of writing scripts, the half-lit cigarettes, the smell of cannabis, and innumerous clones of me, standing all in my small room. Playing all the parts, poking, teasing, laughing and dying..

It was then I asked myself, ‘Will there ever be a moment of truth for me?’… The smoke deepened on the window-panes, the silhouette made the night sky look like a distant road, I could see all the faces smearing to one another... and a voice deep inside me asked, ‘Will the real me ever stand up?’. I felt like I would puke, but I didn’t and like a blaze of gusty wind her ghost covered my existence.

The last time I entered the rehearsal room. My script is finished. It’s all over for me then. I can look at their faces now, faces that waiting to start a story, of their own, I knew my story is finished. “The last time you are going up there”, someone said from my back. My protagonist smiled. I took a small chair and sat behind the scene, far off from the stage, “let them be alive, let me be dead”, I said to myself. Twenty-three seconds, the spotlight is on. It’s all a new world, being born right there. Far off from the stage, I started feeling her breath touching me. Is she still there?

Ten years before her death, on that day, I fell in love.