Performance
Jane.
An original written by Alexandra.
El Jaleo (1882)
John Singer Sargent
The nights are getting warmer, and that
makes me a better performer.
The sun now shines relentlessly until late,
therefore I cannot hide. I must always be great.
I cannot admit that it is not what I pictured,
for this is the life I have persuaded everyone
I have built.
These are the days I will treasure the most,
yet I feel nothing. Completely and holistically.
I feel nothing so deeply. I am merely a voyeur
of something that should only be mine.
I am worried I will not remember it all.
Will anyone remember it all? If I do not
remember, did it happen? For experiences merely
crystallise as memories that quietly float around
the oceans of consciousness. The ocean is big
and I get lost easily.
I have started a new life within the one in which
I already exist. Reincarnation every eighty years is
not enough. I so desperately crave a new life but I
do so, each time, by seeking solace within myself.
Nobody knows and I do not think it is something
fixable or that can be helped. I like to do it. It gets
awfully lonely there, though, and I only have my own
voice echoing within the chambers to respond to
my own calls.
I miss Mike. He would know just what to say. He
would say, “Come on, darling, you were born with
dreams far too big for this small place. You were
meant for a life far, far away.” How do I bring myself
to accept that the one who I love most does not even
think I belong in the place to which he brought me?
These thoughts prick me throughout the day.
One is guilt, one is sadness, one is confusion.
At least I feel something now. I think l can carry on.
I thought maybe it would be a kingdom. Perhaps
with golden trees and sprawling fields that went
beyond the eye could reach. I would think, “If I
could get there, then I would be far away enough.”
But instead, the rain is inside the walls and rock
bottom has got cobblestones. I whisper in the darkness,
“Maybe I am even sadder than I ever was.”
I was not always like this. I was once a young girl who
shrieked with excitement when my father came home early to
take me down to the park and teach me words and
expand the horizons of my deepest, most precious
imaginations. I drew a map of where I would go, and
I travelled the globe to try and find it. But no matter what,
I am reminded of this little girl who still shrieks with
excitement, but in an empty house.
I hear the drip of the leak in the quiet of the night
and my grandfather’s watch ticking next to my head
as I count sheep. Each drop and minute so insistently
nudge temporality to my mind’s forefront.
Yet we must continue. We must perform.
In the anxiety of forgetting, I forget anyway.
The tide never ceases and is at the mercy of the moon.
Each figment of experience continues to drift in
an eternal body of impermanence – like unclaimed
bottles in which messages are carried. They may
never reach land and may never be spoken of again.
Those stories never get their final chapters.
Not even the moon herself stays for long.
It is already morning, and the curtains unveil.
It is time to perform again.
The Ballet Shoe (1932)
Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970)
Courtesy of The Laura Knight Estate / Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove