At first the only sounds are my rhythmic taps on the keyboard, the low metallic murmur of the fridge, and somewhere in the distance, a bird that has found the voice of spring. It's song is erratic and jittery, perhaps it's first attempt, but it's piercing shrillness is unexpectedly comforting as it reaches me. Something else is out there too. Someone else is trying... but not quite making it.
The longer I sit, the more I become acquainted with the absence of noise. The stifling lack of movement. There are too many thoughts for me to even dare stitching them into a semblance of a sentence and these are the moments that scare me most.
Everything I hold onto in the noise is gone.
I love noise, but sometimes I become a slave to it. The movement becomes routine and familiar and no longer do I have to have any cohesive backdrop to my act. No-one needs to see backstage when the performance is quite so gripping.
Surely this should really be the scariest part? The fact that despite the charade, there is very little of me in the performance. I'll pretend that backstage is wide open, that there's nothing to conceal and I'm honest in my struggles. But still further behind that, I get ready in the dressing room and God forbid anyone should see in there.
I'm hiding in the dressing room, preparing backstage, and performing up front, all at once. But in the silence there is now only an audience of one.
He sits, patient, pensive. He watches. The others have left but he remains. He meets me on stage, takes my hand, guides me behind the curtain, through backstage, seats me in the dressing room and waits.
'What do you really feel?'
I don't know where it has come from, as the hum of the fridge cuts out and the bird rests for a moment, but the stillness changes. That claustrophobic silence has lost it's fear.
In the silence, I learnt that it is in the silence that I am myself. No costume or make-up or lines. Just a tired actress who needs to clear her dressing room.
