Remnants

Tonight, like every night, my eyes adjust to the dim glow of the theater after everyone has gone, a rippling of air along the skirt of the main stage curtain, the glowing pools of amber cast by the footlights, the audience long since departed. 

I love this stillness -- more than I love most people if I’m being honest; there is a power in this quiet space, an unspoken potential; three hundred and eighty people file in each evening and twice on the weekends, music swells, lines are flourished for the audience, then paper programs abandoned like discarded hymnals sifting among the rows as the crowd thins, dissipates, fades to silence.

I am always the last to go, and I never leave without a last patrol of the theater – backstage doors locked, the props and costumes stored, ready for the next show, the green room and auditorium cleaned; I sense their impatience with my routine.

The real reason I stay is to stand, center stage, close my eyes, open my arms, and invite whatever echoes of the lives imagined here to once more take the stage – the wings, the catwalks, the orchestra pit, the technician’s booth, perhaps even to use me as their conduit, guide me as I call the next show, pour their electric memory into the floodlights; I am no believer in the supernatural, and yet here I nearly am – there is a mass to this silence, a potentiality that I cannot deny; the gentle hum of the ventilation fans tease the curtains to dance, ever so slightly, the golden path of the footlights mark the way to the exits.

I stand for a full minute or more, then descend the stairs and make my way up the aisle, closing the last door behind me to walk out once more into a night rich with possibilities, so many of our proscribed roles carefully chosen, the audience always seemingly ready to suspend their disbelief, the patient shadows and the hints of those who once walked this stage content in the far reaches of the auditorium for the last of us to leave them their house.