By Binati Arora
(From my Substack collection: Diya’s Interlude)
Dear reader,
If you’re anything like me, you’ve given up your art on a platter. Dying little deaths in the hope of making new pieces from fresh wounds. Which is why I’m here, trying to paint you a picture.
This is a staged production and so far, the audience does not care for our ragtag theatre troop. This is Act I Scene XI and you are onstage, trapped on a ship at sea, completely at the mercy of the waves that crash against your hull. Every dialogue delivered perfectly; you are the brightest star in your own flop excuse of a show. In perfect agony you screech and you tug at ropes that seem to make everything worse. Until.
Until there comes a moment within the chaos, when everything is silent. The storm puts down its weapons for just a second. Fate has thrown you a lifeline, but you don’t bother to lift a finger.
End of Scene XI.
So here is an end, and your character is dying a tragic death. The audience is yawning. The producers are holding their breaths, their hands shaking. No one in the orchestra picks up their instruments in time for the curtains closing. Not a single face in the crowd looks up, everybody is uninterested, even in this horrid blunder.
You are behind the curtains. The crew is rushing to switch out the backdrops with new ones, and you’re lying crumpled on the floor, still playing dead. Someone is grabbing your chin and dabbing at your lips with fresh coats of gloss.
Nobody cries at your funeral. They all know that you’ll be back just as alive in the next scene. That’s what the plot says. Resolution. Resurrection.
Obviously, nobody is crying at your funeral. And you look so silly sprawled on the ground dear, with your face all dolled up. Get up. Get the hell up.
Stand extremely still, as everybody you care for only cares about pleasing an apathetic crowd. Stand extremely still, as all your lines for Scene XII leave the confines of your memory. Stand extremely still, as the curtains rise and you see that everyone has left. Stand extremely still, as the prompter tries to get you to say the right words to an empty auditorium. Open your mouth dear. Open wide. Freeze.
I don’t know what to tell you anymore. I don’t know how to get art back once it leaves your body. All I know is that this is the same void I have been screaming into for months now. The same place where I hope to get my own art back. Would you like to come in? Here is another little death. Welcome to the in-between. You can never fully die here. Nobody will care if you do. Doesn’t that kill you? Your art is already gone. Get it back. Welcome to the interlude.
Welcome to my interlude. I am trying to care about living again.