Page 105 of The Truths We Burn

I refrain from rolling my eyes. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.”

Pulling from his grasp, I disappear inside the theatre hall, pressing my back into the closed door and taking a few deep breaths. In through my nose out through my mouth, taking my time and regrouping my thoughts.

This is my time today, and I won’t let that filth ruin it for me. I’d been taking theatre classes, but it had been months since I’d stepped inside of one. Learning about scripts and playwriting at a desk is nothing compared to the real thing.

I pull my shoulders back, silently walking down the aisle, past the wooden rows of seats. The high ceilings are carved with complex designs, built to carry sounds all the way to the back of the auditorium. I reach the side stairs of the stage, my footsteps echoing as I stride across the floor.

The lighting is dim, just enough to see the first few rows from where I stand, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not about the spotlight or even the theatre itself.

It’s the feeling of the vinyl floors beneath the soles of my feet. The way my voice vibrates the wood when I dive into the character. Being absolutely overtaken by a role, by the writing. It sucks you into an entirely new world, away from reality.

I toss my bag to the side and remove my jacket, leaving me exposed in my black dress with a scalloped neckline that pairs nicely with my red suede boots. I’d loved these shoes once upon a time. They were my signature color, and Rosie had bought them for my birthday years ago.

She’d always been so good at giving gifts, able to notice and remember the little things people enjoyed without them even talking about it.

I stand in the middle of the stage, wiggling my toes in my shoes, letting my head fall to the right and back to the left, and stretching before I look down at my script, seeing where I left off reading last night.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Shakespeare.

A king inside the walls of the theatre, he is the blueprint. The one people aspire to be, to surpass when it comes to playwriting.

I reread the scene a few times, absorbing the structure, wanting to encompass all the emotion, the entire character. Closing my eyes, I shed the pieces of myself and rebuild as Hermia. I forget Sage exists and become the girl who is wholeheartedly in love with Lysander, even though her father wishes for her to marry another.

I embody this emotion of a girl so fiercely enthralled with a man she sees as perfect, one that she is not allowed to long for. I feel that ache in my gut, the longing for a person’s soul, more than just their physical attributes or what they give me materialistically.

When I reopen my eyes, I’m no longer the insane twin.

I’m Hermia.

How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale? How chance the roses there do fade so fast?

I hear Lysander in my head, playing his part, his body more of a loose figure than an actual person.

“Belike for want of rain, which I could well beteem them from the tempest of my eyes.”

Old English is simple, when you read enough of it. It’s so simple for her to just saythe color is gone because I am saying it is, but I could make the roses regrow from the tears I’ve cried for our love. But it’s so much more fun to encode it, to read between the lines of romantic vocabulary.

Ay me! For aught that I could ever read, could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth. But, either it was different in blood—

“O cross! Too high to be enthralled to low.” I throw my hands dramatically, a sly grin on my face as we banter back and forth on everyone else’s requirements for love. The rules for the heart, when in truth, the only thing that should never have rules is love.

Or else misgraffed in respect of years.

Oh spite! Too old to be engaged to young

“Or else it stood upon choice of friends.”

Oh hell! To choose love by another’s eyes.

The scene goes deeper, speaking about how quickly love can be destroyed by the ones around you. By the expectations set by your family and friends. How we are expected to marry within our own societal standards. That if you must be with someone that is just right for you in the eyes of the world. Not too young, not too old.

It’s the tale of star-crossed lovers in a different setting, a different space. But the pain, it’s still the same. The sting of wanting what you can never, ever have.

It’s a sting I know. A sting so sharp that I start to crack through Hermia’s character. My pain, as Sage, flows within the act.

Steal forth thy father’s house to-morrow night; And in the wood, a league without the town, Where I did meet thee once with Helena, To do observance to a morn of May—There will I stay for thee.