| Fateless I thought I saw him last night as I gazed into the mirror in my dressing room. I was dressed in my street clothes after a performance and I had managed to get most of my makeup off which was always a good thing. Then I looked up and saw him in my reflection. It was just a fleeting image, too quick to hold on to or keep as something real or something that once was real. It flickered by just long enough to make my heart stop but then I blinked and it was gone. He was gone. It didn�t seem real. But yet it was. He was there; I saw him finally. He called out to me from across the street and started to run to me but then a car passed and he was gone. After months of sensing him, feeling his pain, he was there and they took him away. It wasn�t fair. Of course it�s not fair, a voice sneered. Don�t you see now what I�ve been trying to tell you all along? People don�t have happy endings. Life doesn�t work that way. No. I wasn�t going to let them all be right. I gathered my things and left the theater through the back door. I decided against taking the time to hail a taxi and decided to walk to the hospital. Elisabeth, what are you doing? The voice asked. Didn�t you hear what I said? It�s over. He�s gone. You can scream and cry all you want but you can�t change it. There are things in this life that are bigger than you. Things beyond your control. Remember what I told you when you were little? You�re just a sad little girl and you always will be. Your life is not supposed to be beautiful. Did you ever wonder why I took him away in the first place? I stopped walking and leaned against a wall crying the worst tears, the tears that burst out of your chest and explode out of you making you want to keel over with the pain of living. �Shut up!� I screamed. �You�ve already ruined my life. Don�t worry it�s not beautiful. But to be truly ugly must there be some beauty in it?� Of course. That�s why you�re not deformed and you have a job that pays most of the time. I may be cruel Elisabeth but that would ruin all the fun. I finally stopped crying and began to sing. I sung a song I made up off the top of my head. A song of opposites, incongruous pieces and the world which is like a distorted mirror. I sang my way to the hospital and breezed through the door right up to the lady at the front desk. Her nametag read Flora Bird. God, what an awful name. It sounded like it came out of Mary Poppins or something. I hated that movie because in reality a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine taste worse. Why wouldn�t that woman get off the damn phone and talk to me? Whatever the person on the end was talking about couldn�t possibly be that important. She finally hung up but she looked right through me and began talking to man behind me. I stepped to the side irritated but still humming under my breath. Sometimes I wanted to sing my life away. �Elisabeth.� Suddenly he was there standing behind me. No one else seemed to notice or care. I knew it. I knew they couldn�t really take him away from me. He looked like hell with matted dark curls, skin that was scraped, bruised and encrusted with dirt and clothes that hung awkwardly off his narrow frame. I took it all in because I had never seen him before. His eyes intrigued me the most because I couldn�t see the world in them like I thought I would. They made me fill in the blanks with my own skewed perception. �What took you so long?� He asked me taking my hand and leading me out of the hospital and down the street. �Some annoying voice in my head kept bothering me but he finally shut up and now I�m free.� Ha, ha. That was so funny I�m not even laughing. But I soon will be. Watch this. We had stopped in a sports bar where the bartender was ignoring us. What was up with everyone ignoring us? It was like we weren�t even there. There was a news report showing on the TV mounted on the wall which we turned to watch out of boredom. �In other news, the Broadway community grieves tonight for Elisabeth Bartlett the talented young star of the hit musical Fateless. She was hit by a car while crossing Pinehurst Boulevard. Last night on that very street Zachary Bell, a convicted drug dealer escaped from prison, was killed on that very street. We have recently received news that he died at Memorial Hospital tonight.� Ha! See that! You�ve wanted this from the beginning and now you�re getting what you wanted! And guess what? It doesn�t even matter because you�re dead! Suddenly it all made sense. Why everyone except Zach seemed to look right through me, why the world seemed to be at arms length- too far away to hurt me. I was dead and so was Zach. There was nothing left for us in this life anymore. This was end. But so what? We had each other. It�s not like we needed anyone else. I had my happy ending even if the rest of the world wouldn�t see it as happy. No one could take this away from me. For once there was silence. I didn�t hear the noise in the bar or any voice in my head. I only heard the news report as it played a clip of me in Fateless. They were showing my ending monologue. ��so now everyone, including me, knows the truth but the truth doesn�t even matter any more. Because no matter how long people try to solve crimes or proclaim the meaning of life to the world, all of life�s truths will always be a mystery, even to me.� |