Yesterday's News

I'll start with a confession: I've always been a selfish person who has wanted the world all to herself.
Every square inch of glimmering excitement around me, every ounce of energy and attention from people around me, every shining spotlight in my 100 mile radius...... I've wanted it all.

But our fleeting lives are like play productions on Broadway. Sometimes we're onstage; sometimes we're off. Sometimes our show is a great success. Sometimes it's a long, drawn-out, money- and time-sucking flop. And whether the season is a thrilling success or bombastic disaster, there's one thing we can all be certain of: Broadway has to go on.

Like I've said in a previous post, there's a time for everything. Events in our lives all must run their courses. Often, when they do or don't isn't something that we decide.

We all take turns on that stage.

I'm sitting in the audience right now. I'm sitting in the very back of theater with the darkened shadows and the dusty drapes, and I'm watching you standing there. Standing in the bright glow of the spotlight, standing where the world can see you.
I can feel your racing excitement. I can feel how you feel, with the blood pulsing through your veins, ignited by the candleflames in your heart that only swell to raging forest fires as those clotted paths of your life begin to unfurl slowly, leaving all the world in your arms
this time around.

I can feel it all the way from the back of the audience. The lights, the glitter, the fame, the glory. I can touch it, taste it, and smell it, as if it were an object more tangible than the mildewing chair on which I reside. And more than anything else, I wish I was where you are...

..... where the world is full, where the moon is bright, where the diamonds fall into your lap like raindrops on a summer night
....... where the fragments of life's mysteries are slowly piecing together perfectly into a completed picture
..........where there's excitement, where there's giddy apprehension, where there's innocent love


Jealousy is a powerful, gnawing force.
But I'm not jealous, though I feel like I should be.
No. I've far surpassed jealousy, lodged tightly into the realm of consistent indifference, with emotions as obscure as the polluted streets of London in a morning fog.

My turn onstage has been over for a while. From the dusty back row, I am just another spectator. I am just another faded star fallen from her prime. I am an ordinary person, washed-out like yesterday's laundry on the banks of the Louvre- colorless, unrecognizable.
I am an outdated front cover story, blown-over and exhausted.


I am back in the drab grey of monotony, holding a paper cup of coffee on my seven o'clock train to work.




And I am far, far too young to feel this wasted.