Three, two, one, Action! The alarm clock trills loudly, tearing me out of a deep sleep with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It’s not so much a wake up call as an impulse to assume my fake identity. I put on the costume of the girl I wrote so carefully into the pages of my endless screenplay. The role is blasé, really. A smart , kind, helpful person, laden with little eccentricities and traces of what she generally calls “OCD.” She’s a passable athlete, a straight-A student, and an out-of-the-ordinary, outspoken, perhaps even annoying person. She has her share of tough stuff, though perhaps she blows it a bit out of proportion. Still, though she makes a half-hearted attempt to hide it, she’s not all too secretive about her pain. After all, it gets her attention. And that’s what she really strives for: the spotlight.
Every day starts the same way – waking up to the scripted reality and the call of “lights, camera, action.” Characteristically lazy, she snoozes in a few times, rushes through getting ready, and runs out the door at the last minute, usually managing to steam off at least one parental unit. She gets on the bus, preparing herself for the “stage.” And once she arrives, it’s a non-stop, part scripted, part ad-lib reel from start to finish.
Unfortunately for her, she lacks the key element that can bring her into the spotlight; reality. She’s so conflicted about what’s real and what’s acting that people just look the other way when she enters for her little cameos. Sure, she gets noticed every now and then, when one aspect of her role clicks for long enough to be believable. But she isn’t star material.
All too often, she looks for what’s underneath; she looks for me. She stares into mirrors as if they will peel away the makeup and reveal me. She reaches inside herself, grasping, just barely brushing the tendrils of what
I am. But it always eludes her. She even turns to other people, performing an elaborate melodrama of confusion and pain and desperation. Maybe if she talks long enough, I will begin to talk through her. Maybe if she tries to open herself up, the other person will reach in and expose me, expose the truth about what lurks inside her. But she loves the spotlight too much; she doesn’t want to relinquish her role. She is so used to seeing the stage setting there in front of her and having all the props readily provided, and she doesn’t think I will be strong enough to set my own stage and earn my own props.
Still I intrigue and compel her. After all, there must have been a time when she was me, when the heavy curtains were closed and the theatre empty. I’m her hidden demon. Sometimes she grows so desperate that she tears away at her very skin, trying to get underneath, trying to strip away the costume and reveal me. But then the pain brings back her sense of false reality. She acts brave and determined and tosses her head, wanting the world to see that she looked for me and I wasn’t there. Or maybe she waits for someone to come and reach beneath the scars. But when the spotlight turns away from her betrayal to drama, the cycle only re-starts itself.
The irony of it all is that the one story she does not know is her own. Her elaborate quests land her parts in a story she believes she can star in, while the hidden cameras of her real audience play away unnoticed.
I can’t promise that she will ever learn to give herself away. How can she, when all her life she has only taken without a cost? I am waiting patiently for the day when she stops striving for the limelight and comes to terms with her own little role; when she takes off the costume of the tragic heroine and becomes who she is supposed to be: me. Because I don’t care who reads my story. I don’t care who recognizes my face. I give with no thought of receiving, love with no thought of being loved, and help with no thought of reward. I’m the girl behind the cameras, the girl who watches her own life take shape on the stage at the mercy of a talented actress and is powerless to stop the disaster. My name doesn’t even appear on the credits. And yet I hold what she, for all of her flamboyance, cannot: reality.
