Weekly Writing – July 13 2024

The worst part was that they couldn’t remember whether it had always been that way.
They should have. It should have been obvious. If the door to their bedroom had always been the glimmering, expectant gap between backstage and a waiting spotlight, they couldn’t have mistaken it for anything else. If they’d always hesitated on the threshold in that hush, they couldn’t have forgotten.
So how could it feel like something they’d just learned recently? If they’d had a real wooden door before, how was it that they couldn’t remember?
If their kitchen had been closed in by four comfortable, private walls before, why could they only remember it as the yawning space they screwed up their courage to step into? With darkness as its ceiling and the table so small at stage centre, the spotlight angled so that its shadow and his stretched to fill the empty space on a backdrop of black silhouettes?
He smiled at them as if they had four walls around them, lifting his mug in greeting. They couldn’t remember whether the newspaper he held was the same prop from yesterday.
“Good morning,” he said, as if he couldn’t hear the restless rustling of the audience beyond that spotlight. “Sleep well?”
They didn’t remember their line. Didn’t remember whether they’d ever been given any. Didn’t remember what they would have said within four walls, if there had ever been walls, or whether he had ever smiled at them not as if trying to make it visible from the back rows.
They didn’t remember if they’d slept, or if, when they hadn’t remembered their line, someone had just called for them to take it from the top.