'Blocking' real people for her shot and for the stage, knowing that how she places them manipulates how the viewer perceives them. While preserving an ember of emotion, empathy perhaps, feeling with strangers and their life stories intensely, realizing that she will always carry a part of them, of their "touch" with her, she accepts getting "hurt". The pain of someone else's pain, the scars that define and transform people through life, is what makes people what they are and what makes their never-wavering courage to "go on" breathtaking admirable.
He admires her for that; it is just not him. Living on a base, working with trauma patients every day, hardened him. An order is an order. There are no alternatives. Discipline and the perfection of skill are to be desired. Privately, he pleasures in testing his cavalier senses, setting ambitious goals and getting his kicks from the ultimate satisfaction. It takes patience and practice. Perhaps selfishness. And certainly cold detachment from any muddling emotions.
Meeting her was a direct and rude cross of his agenda. Their encounter was a dance, and how she waltzed through his life; not only could he no longer remember the steps, he was losing control. Their last conversation about the mysteries of the ‘soul’, the undefined, unshaped something making a person immortal, had been invigorating. Her remarks that in the end, it is all a "reflex" of a life and pictures lived...a person's life is flashing by, memories lived to scramble up in full color yet once more before they fade into nothingness as the event of death kicks in, befuddled him. “Did you come up with that,” he asked intrigued and somewhat stunned. Who was she to speak so extemporaneously? He was getting lured into a very dangerous game. A game that he foresaw himself losing, if he did not end things right there and then.
Final words of many many things left unsaid will leave them wondering for time to come. Moments people let slip through their hands to find something new, thinking it is better than what they have...Their story is one of many. As a writer and as a story-teller I can only watch, never interfere.
© Colleen Yorke. All rights reserved.