The Written Performance

A story can be found in any number of places, incubating in the warmth of the room, waiting to be realised, read, written or dreamt; there is a story on the floor right here where I spilt my coffee the other morning and broke my favourite mug by accident; there is a story near the window on a stool where files and papers lie atop each other waiting to be sorted; I sense a story in the garbage bag full of old clothes in the centre of the room; in the nail studded wall above the desk where I can't seem to decide what pictures to hang; there is story upon story, stacked haphazardly on the nightstand next to a wooden picture-frame; books with pages bent like dog ears; or inside the mangled cotton sheets twisted, as if to a pattern, at the foot of the bed, where Samson, the cat, sleeps selfishly, clawing at the mattress when my typing gets loud.

When I wake up in the morning, it is only a matter of time before I succumb to the leather chair, the cup of tea, the pillows, the bedside lamps, and above all the dusty pages with coffee stains and biscuit crumbs saved snugly inside. Books are my tickets to other worlds; when I open one, I find my room is no longer a walled-in space.

In fact, it is not a room at all, but only a wardrobe leading to Narnia; a lofty tree in the English countryside; a scorching African desert; a palace courtyard in the middle-east; a mansion in the Swiss mountains; a sailing ship; the view from atop a cliff; a wooden shanty house, damp from the rain; a feeling at the pit of my stomach; a suspicion; a dream; a conversation; a whole other universe far from where my body lies –

And then I find I am not my body at all, which lies with a cushion behind its head, its eyes running keenly over letters and commas and full stops; colons and semicolons, hyphens, white spaces, accents and smudged out words. I find I am an Irishman, a little boy, a flower girl, a bride, the wife of a traveller, a dead man, a poet, an island, a song, a flute, a dog or an old Mexican woman telling a story.

I will gather my audience of invisible people from all places and times who have leapt from their pages and are here with me now, and this is how I will perform:

I will sit myself down on the full stop
And look back over the letters,
Typed clean, and unambiguous on white paper.
I will marvel at their shapes; the curves of the o's and the c's.
The smooth, flat terraces on top of the capital t's.
I will put my fingers through the holes in the p's, the o's and the g's.
I will think about carrying away a few simple e's by
Their handles. Or perhaps I could hang an a from its loop?

But the letters are in ink and they will not budge.
Not even if I were to leap from the end of the sentence
To the middle or the top.
The words are solid. I am not.

So I will drink them in with my eyes.
Allow the colours to separate.
Swallow them, sound by sound.
Memorise their every movement.