The stage is filled with actors. Chaos erupts from their mouths -- snatches of song, lines from the play, commerical jingles, random noises, foreign languages, ect. Everything at once, everything loud, everything deeply felt.
The Guy appears among them, a foreign language dictionary in his hand. Another actor, who so far has been silent, watches him.
AN ACTOR
It's not going to help you.
THE GUY
What??
AN ACTOR
It is not going to help you!
THE GUY
What won't??
AN ACTOR
Your book! It's not useful here!
THE GUY
I'm sorry! The noise... it makes it very difficult to hear!
The actor snaps his fingers. The babbling stops. Frozen.
AN ACTOR
Ask and ye shall recieve.
THE GUY
And this is the part where you say something important.
AN ACTOR
Ah. You're starting to see the patterns...
THE GUY
Yes, unfortunately. It's difficult not to, when you do this every single day, to start to see the ways in which your mind constructs the same path toward an idea. This is one of those days when something someone said triggered a thought -- vague and unformed, but a thought nonetheless -- and you are here, nameless character, to give some shape to it.
AN ACTOR
The Tower of Babel, then?
THE GUY
Yes. So now you say something that makes the spark of an idea turn into the whole thing.
AN ACTOR
No. I won't do that.
THE GUY
Really?
AN ACTOR
Really. It's late, and this isn't the place.
THE GUY
It isn't?
AN ACTOR
No. We're not in the Biblical Babel, although that's certainly worthy of a play down the road.
This Babel is the place where lost things go when they're no longer being looked for.
It's kind of a sad place, really.
They come to this place to be heard, even if no one really listens... at least to be heard.
An actor from the chaos starts to speak. It's The Fella.
THE FELLA
Hey Mr. Daigle. When are we hanging out?
THE GUY
Oh, it's you.
THE FELLA
I miss you.
THE GUY
It has been a while.
THE FELLA
We don't really talk like we used to.
THE GUY
No we don't.
THE FELLA
That's okay. Really, it is. I'm off someplace else. I'm not just here. There's somebody on my radar. And I know there's someone on yours...
THE GUY
Yes, there is.
THE FELLA
But there's still that little part... you know. You wrote about it before. We always seem to be doing this... pulling apart, and inching back together.
THE GUY
Yeah, that was what we've done before.
THE FELLA
A matter of time.
THE GUY
Not this time.
This one isn't just something to tide me over
until I get a chance to spend time with you again.
This one matters.
THE FELLA
Oh.
THE GUY
(to the actor)
Why am I even telling him this? He doesn't really miss me. Not like this. This is just some dumb thing I need to do to make myself feel better.
AN ACTOR
Lost things have a language all their own.
And to lose a love, however tentative and new, is the hardest language to unlearn.
We speak it until our tongues fall out
until our eyes glaze over
until the words stop sounding like words and
become something more like guttural grunts and moans
and then
only then
are we finally able to put the words to rest.
You move past things, but the conversation doesn't end.
And the conversations we stop having in life continue here,
until they've played themselves out.
It's not the best solution, but it's the only one we've got right now.
THE GUY
I should have known something would have failed when I didn't even give him a name. Even now, even in life, he was never a name. Just a moniker. The Fella. The 20-Year Old. An idea... and I was the same for him.
AN ACTOR
We all are short-sighted.
THE GUY
You can snap them back on now. The play's done. It's messy, but it's finished. Like me and him. Art mirrors life.
AN ACTOR
Fair enough.
He snaps. The chaos begins. The Guy joins in.
We might be unsatisfied, but there is always tomorrow's play. Always the next thing. Alwats what's yet to be spoken.
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2 comments:
it's funny how the fella, even though your supposedly over him, keeps popping up, i think one should be done before moving to another?
I think 'the Fella' needs to stop being a narcissistic ninny and get on with his own life instead of involving himself in other people's lives. So fuck off 'the Fella', and by the way, this isn't 'the Guy.'
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