What must it feel like, to suddenly become aware of the audience around you? To suddenly notice all the room around you has disappeared and is replaced by a pale imitation, no furniture, no door, just a lit backdrop on an empty stage? What must it feel like, to see everyone watching you, laughing at you, ignoring your cries for help, watching you get dragged off stage to your death?
And then for it all to be reset, like nothing ever happened, and you forget, forget yourself completely to sing the opening number, dressed as yourself but not yourself, and you’re only truly present at your shitty dead-end barista job, where you meet a man that makes you smile, and your boss keeps referencing a line that isn’t there, and the coffee cups are empty, and over and over you make the same quips, ask the same questions, tell the same stories, until suddenly, it’s over, the apocalypse is here, and everyone’s singing, and you’re wandering through an alley way that feels almost alive, and then the man in front of you isn’t the man you knew, was never the man you knew, and neither are you, and suddenly—
Suddenly there’s a stage.
This happened to my good friend Emma Perkins
