“Haven’t seen you on this floor in a while”
The Shirt and Tie says to me with an absent, polite smile.
“Oh I’ve been–pretty busy” I say, stocking my umpteenth can of Diet Snapple into the company fridge.
What I wish I could say
What my heart says what my soul screams is:
“Since you saw me last, I said goodbye to my kids.
The little ones I taught for the past 5 months, the difficult ones, the brilliant ones, the ones who memorized their songs without prompting, the ones who peed their pants, the ones who banged their heads against the desks repeatedly to the rhythm of the Moana song they had sung so joyfully the week before in a fit frustration and unspoken rage. I left some with hugs and a few tears, I left others with very little ceremony at all.
Since you saw me last, I found myself in one of the most exciting theatrical projects of my life, a too-short reading in a room with Broadway giants, playing lovers with my real-life love, singing songs from my favorite era, songs my heart has been obsessed with since I can remember.
Since you saw me last I returned down south. I ran through green utopias with my mom and stepdad taking in the
intoxicating smell of homeland nature, I glided across waters with my dad and for a moment felt the freedom of a mind with no inner voice but the wind, I held my best friend’s child in my arms and saw the face of pure beauty and love and eyes of the most startling blue smiling back at me, I saw this friend as a mother for the first time and remembered her as The Bakers Wife in our school play and marveled at the synchronicity of life, I sat on a floor and giggled with my mother as we painted our nails and created our own adventure when the rain kept us inside.
Since you saw me last, I found myself in an artist heaven in Massachusetts, staying in a gorgeous farmhouse mansion filled to the brim with people of insane talent and inspiration, playing a role I’ve been working on on and off for the past 3 years in one of the most moving shows I’ve known, being cared for and fed by the sisters who the play is written about and for, hanging with the coolest dog I’ve met in quite a while. Breathing in green, breathing out music, being a part of a long evolution of a beautiful piece of art.
Since you saw me last, I retreated with my art partners to the most lovely Middle Of Nowhere place I know, incubating new songs, getting very serious and getting very silly, joining in a cinematic rave with just the 3 of us and approximately 3 million fireflies, building fires and dreaming and watching and falling under the spell of our fellow music makers beneath an impossibly open sky, each a unique voice with such important songs to sing.
Now I’m back. On your floor. I am your Temporary Kitchen Assistant. I take out the trash and I set out the food I make the coffee and I re-re-re-re-stock your sodas. A few minutes ago I got reprimanded (kindly and rightfully, I admit) for reading during lunch, a book about the character I played a few short weeks ago, because in the Real World in which I mostly feel like a visitor, occupying one’s mind while one is supposed to be doing the task one is getting paid to do is a no-no ( I’m instantly reminded of my friend’s job behind a drugstore counter, the self-described “petri-dish for madness”, it’s no easy task to demand a creator’s mind to be still.)
In the past month, Shirt and Tie, I have lived a thousand little lives in this cosmic nano-blink of time in the Goddess’s great green eye. I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing a year, a month, or a week from now, but chances are likely I’ll wind up on your floor again sometime. And if you should chance to press further, and ask that age-old baffling bastion of small talk question: “What have you been up to lately?” I’ll return your polite smile through all the emotion, the sadness, the excitement, the frustration, the hope, the immense overwhelmingness of sewing a life together, and reply in that most wicked and mysterious and complex understatement of my formative years: “Oh, this and that.”
