Stars, Like Runaway Dead Pixels

I settled myself down before the dorm’s entrance and listened to the invisible crickets echoing each other in the undergrowth.

Well, before my dorm mates came by from 7-11 and brought me to the lounge to chat shit anyway.

To call these 4 months a journey would be clichéd and I’m one for ironic flair, so I’ll just call it as it is, a production.

I remember ushering all kinds of friends to watch my production; but when it came to my cousins, the primary purpose of my coming to Stage, I lambasted the production for being racist, cliché and most critically, amateurish. I ripped it to shreds with my forked tongue and two-faced hatred. No idea why; perhaps I thought I could do better, perhaps I thought my cousins could do better, perhaps I was sick of it all and thought it impossible. Perhaps I was jealous that everyone got to show off how well they could act like another person, that everyone had their own gang of inside jokes that I would never fully be integrated with, while I was left with the (admittedly volunteered) technical and administrative shindig.

And yet on the show days (almost all 3 days were sold out!) I was moved to pieces with the spirit and enthusiasm the casts had, the fun little dance session we all had right before the final show and the final curtain call, with the blinding stage lights obscuring the audience and my name being announced as The Stage Manager We Couldn’t Have Done Without. I don’t know why everyone revered me, because anyone could’ve done this job. Perhaps I should take it as it is, that everything is, and not ask any more.

Afterwards, Zenda came up to me and told me that it wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be, along with Ping and An chirping in. (Wendy kept silent) I ashamedly attributed it to humility, but made a note to ask Mike about what he made of it.

Mike chose to chide me for my horrid comments and told me that it was good that I kept it away from the talents. It was the naked, piercing truth, and is still lodged within my mind like an asteroid.

I’ve been preparing these four months to bask in the afterglow of a long production, but this horrendous feeling is eating me up from the inside. The flowers look wilted.

Maybe the medium was right.