Need

My creative writing prof told us to draw a map of somewhere that was important to us and write about it. Here's what I came up with.

~

I need peace.

This day has gone totally south, and I just need a minute. But there isn't a place on this whole damn campus to be alone. I really don't feel like wearing the happy facade today.

I start walking. Where is a piano? I need a piano. Can't afford a practice room. All the classrooms in the chapel are taken.

Wait.

I remember.

I head for the SSC, past Rinnova, up the stairs, threading my way through the cheerful masses, keeping my eyes on the ground so I don't have to speak to any of them.

On my way down the hallway through the double doors, I stop at the bulletin board across from Mr. C's office. How many times, in how many different ways have I come to this board? The elation of seeing your name - your very own name - next to Lady Pernelle, Sarah Goode, chorus, cook #3.

The trudge in your step but "congratulations" on your lips because you were an idiot and went with other people to see the results. And you wait until you're in the shower to kneel in the hot of your tears that are not selfish disappointment but terror at not having somewhere to fit this year.

As I slip through the door and down the hidden stairs, I remember coming here in another moment of terror, when I realized that I had fallen short again, been found not good enough again. I sat in the empty hallway downstairs with a journal in my backpack and Thomas Newman in my ears, trying to make myself believe the lie that I was not defined by my shortcomings.

The wonder in khakis and hiking boots saw me then, coming out of the room between the dressing rooms where he worked well into the night on his costumes, his masterpieces.

It's not the same without him.

If you keep going down that hall, lined with the pictures of the past that beam like postcards in an album, you get to the crowded room dotted with round light bulbs. It's in this room that I've been bruised, bedazzled, doused in grey hair color, burned with curling irons, streaked with old age, and dressed in both custom-tailored sparkles and a dirt-streaked sack.

Turn right out of the stench of burning hair and cheap hairspray and you're in the room of a thousand worlds, where a thousand characters have taken breath from the costumes hanging from the ceiling, the portraits of strangers glaring from the walls, the ancient books rescued from the garbage because someone saw their cracked bindings and faded names and said "perfect."

Out the right side and to the left is the alcove where I hid from the farce two years ago, crammed under the stairs with Fahrenheit 451. I've rocketed down these stairs at break-neck speed, in a floor-length lavender dress and high heels, trailing endless bobby pins and layers of crinoline, fighting to be street-clothed again before twenty others girls piled into the tiny dressing rooms, begging to be unzipped, unpinned, set free from lace and hatpins and pantyhose.

If you stand at the top of those stairs and look back down, it looks like the gateway to a dungeon: fluorescent-white light on the landing as the stairs curve and descend to nowhere.

Samantha blacked out on those stairs.

A true professional waits to pass out until AFTER they've delivered their lines.

I am honorary, but not professional. I swallowed a wad of gum and wrenched my dainty gloves from the waistband of my too-big skirt seconds before the curtain rose. I got the end of a parasol tangled in the lace of my dress dead-center-stage. I always broke character when l'Imposter shouted "GLORY HALLELUJAH!" and darted across the stage in handcuffs with a very grumpy constable in tow. I dropped a cigarette during the opening scene.

But still I belong here.

I fit here.

I always have.

I fit when Kelly took me to the makeup room and washed grey hairspray out of my tangled hair, working it into the crawling braid that I always wished she would teach me how to do.

I fit when I put my feet in a chair with Daniel's, my baby socks looking so small next to his huge black pilgrim shoes, and talked to him about nothing for the hour between his four lines in Act I and my three in Act II.

I fit when I took my dashed hopes of starring and learned to fly instead.

I fit when the witches and their accusers sneaked behind the theatre and danced to a drum-beat ringtone until the minister chased us back inside.

I fit even when I realized that character shoes and running on carpet don't mix and busted my knee all to hell, with one witness muttering "Hey, be careful there" without turning his head.

I shut myself in the movement studio with the old battered upright, finally away from the hoards that I don't understand and can't stand to be around. In an hour I have to be upstairs to sweep the stage and haul scenery down from the ceiling for Act I Scene I.

Another circus begins. Another hell week is upon us.

My time to do homework, socialize, sleep, wash clothes, eat will be seriously curtailed. But I can't wait. And I will miss it when it's over. So I will soak up every single minute that I have left.

It's where I belong. I'd be nuts not to.