Relief Writers Network

My life belongs on a stage. I breathe the musty theater air--stale and old like the inside of a tin can. I walk through my days, spacing how many stage-lengths it takes to trod to school, to sojourn between classes, to walk from my bed to the upstairs bath.
The person I am most like is not what you see. Within me, my inner voice does not project. My hidden person stands with shoulders hunched and pale cheeks bleeding into the lights that drift in from my eyes to the inner stage.
The first time my sneakers found their way to the worn wooden steps that ascend to the stage in the Reagan High School auditorium, I was six and clustered unwillingly with my first grade class. Busses had shuttled grades one through five from nearby Reagan Elementary, a school whose largest room was the joint gymnasium/cafeteria. That being the case, we borrowed the high school’s auditorium for our annual Christmas Choral Concert.
And so, each year followed the next, my sneakers growing bigger and my limbs lengthening, even as my disdain for the full hour spent in song grew faster than any normal growth spurt.
Sixth grade brought me to a new world entirely- a world filled with whispered secrets and friendships ripped apart and then brought back together like Velcro, the smallest little dispute bringing feuds, the passing of a day of boredom inciting reconciliation.
I felt alien in my own skin, one day I was certain I could reverse time and remain a child forever, a child’s burdens light upon my growing shoulders; but some days I would awaken with a fury of nervous energy, my hair sticking out in every direction from the hour I had spent trying to style it like my mother’s. On these days, I could not bear the sight of my toys, my childish bed sheets, my cartoon-character knapsack. I would run to school, my limbs straining and my heart about to burst, arriving glistening with a new type of sweat other than the glisten of childhood energy.
But whichever skin I embraced when I awoke, I knew in my heart that she did not belong. I used to have friends—girls to giggle with at lunchtime, boys to chase on the playground—but now I found myself standing apart, watching them play all sorts of new games. But I would not let myself be one of them.
The hours had never been so long. The world of the non-child was one of expansive blue carpet and fluorescent lighting. The non-child was banned from the pounded dirt of the play ground, the open sky free to be touched by the feet of a swinger, the shouts and screams of romping free-spirits. The non-child was to learn. To learn to sit. To learn that the freedom of a child is something to leave behind.
Those three years faded into the oil paints brushed upon the ceiling tiles; the lunches spent among the cracked spines of the fiction section; the study halls in the corner of my home room, my back pressed against a shelf of American History text-books, my eyes grazing across my book and up like a darting moth. I watched the rest of my classmates, certain their scorn would burn through my clothing and leave me naked and bare.
I ate alone. I went to the restroom alone. I can count on both hands the number of times a boy was dared to come up to me and confess his undying like, only to rush back to his friends to receive claps on the back and uproarious laughter.
Here in the world of the non-child, there was only one correct answer. If you tried to adlib, the collective spit you out and trod you down.
My world in those years was defined as worlds of words into which my spirit could escape. Ella Enchanted. Lord of the Rings. Ender’s Game. Bridge to Tarabithia. The Golden Compass. In these, I found that it was possible to be small and still change the world, save the world. But in the world of the non-child, freedom was in putting others down. Tyrants were the only heroes who got any press.
By the time I left the dank and dimly enlightened halls of middle school, the girl who entered senior high was both bright and bitter. But now I felt open and exposed to the scrutiny of a student body rather than a small, contained cohort of tormentors.
A miracle happened in my non-child-not-adult world. After only a semester of being pushed aside at my own locker, sneered at in the hallway, and tripped in the bus, my own body saved me.
Between the winter of my freshman year and the spring of my sophomore, I went from a sturdy four foot eleven and a half inches, a height I had for years, to five feet seven and showing no indication of stopping.
It was just height, but for some reason, more changed in my perspective than inches. Being a bitter short girl made my movements tight and acidic. Becoming a bitter tall girl made me lofty and more graceful with each passing day. My feet ceased to drag, but rather took on a confident lope that carried me past everyone, my head rising above the crowd. I discovered something incredible: I could not feel their biting eyes. I was now out of range.
Ignoring everyone became my new freedom. For some reason it carried over into my own home, my burgeoning self walled away from the parents who had conceived me. My brother entered middle school and I saw his shoulders slump with the burden. I watched him become a non-child. There was nothing I could do to stop it, so I never tried.
My new height made my limbs slim as willow branches, my collar bone poked from my neck, and all my skin seemed stretched taut over the body beneath.
Being invisible was bliss. It was like aloe after the scorch of scorn that plagued me in my other life. Eyes would pass over me, my body like a pale, elongated shadow stretched thin in the noon sun.
I would catch myself sucking in my breath, making my slip of a self even smaller, waiting to see if the breeze of my passing would make them glance up. All at once I went from scorn, to invulnerability, to complete invisibility.
I spoke when it was necessary and refrained whenever possible. My voice became small and flat, my eyes bright and keen from watching the world wash across the people just beyond my reach.
And still the hallways echoed around me in a comforting dimness. My sneakers floated just above the high-traffic carpet and I slid like ethereal mist through the highlands--class to class, locker to desk. I was absorbed in the vastness of my own solitude.
One morning at the end of my sophomore year, I sat in the cafeteria, scratching my name in faux calligraphy into the brown-bag cover of my French text. I saw a shadow emerge in the edge of my field of vision.
“Emily.” Someone said my name. That in itself was enough to startle me. I glanced up and saw my vice principle, silver-haired and smiling, her clothes smelling of cigarette smoke. I wrinkled my nose and looked at her expectantly.
“I wanted to talk to you about our theater program.”
And that was when I first heard that my wispy body was striking in its paleness, regal in its lean and weedy height. That apparently there was something about me that had the unbelievable potential to be anything but invisible.
The first time I auditioned, the lights of the stage blinded me, dazing me and dipping my entire spine in chills. I stood there sweating chunks of ice, and entirely off-putting experience.
But then I began to speak the words I had carefully memorized, slipping into the character and lifting my eyes to the darkness beyond the edge of the stage. I could not see them, but I knew that from within the darkness eyes watched me, sizing me up and down.
And for the first time in my life, I did not mind. In fact, I rose to the challenge. They told me that my voice was far too quiet, and so I began to speak louder, finding that place in my stomach from which true projection comes. I got cast as a small part in Midsummer Night’s Dream, coincidently the play that that kid in the Dead Poet’s Society performed in before he killed himself. I am not drawing parallels; I just watch a lot of films.
In any case, I acted for the first time on stage when I was almost sixteen. The thrill of the audience laughing or murmuring appreciatively was a high that spurred me on to greater things. My theater instructor praised me highly and gave me a much larger part in the next play. By the time I was at the end of my Junior year, I had won the lead role without question. It was then that boys began to ask me out.
I hated them. I hated them for the sheer fact that they were attracted to someone who was not at all me. When I was myself, tall and alone, they ignored me stoically; now that I was painted with stage makeup and acting like someone else, they became interested. I never gave any of them a chance. They never deserved a chance.
Then I met Robert. He was different. He told me he loved me for who I was. So I acted my best for him; acted like a doting girl friend, acted like a skank, acted like anything to make him happy. I did anything he asked to make him stay.
And then Robert turned in his playbill, tossed me some bad reviews, and just like that he was gone from my life. I swore that I would never step foot on a stage in my own life ever again.
The person I am most like is not what you see. Within me, my inner voice does not project. My hidden person stands with shoulders hunched and pale cheeks bleeding into the lights that drift in from my eyes to the inner stage.
My life has always been empty, an empty stage. No longer. I will live life for me. I will perform improve as much as I like. I will throw away the script and burn to ashes all my costumes. I will be Emmy. I will be loved. I am no longer a child, but I can and will be free again.

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