My second year project at the National Theatre School of Canada, “Watch Me Drown,” will be read today at 7pm.
I just wanted to take some time, reflect, and look back on the spark that led to this moment.
It all started with a monologue:
I died last night in a swimming pool.
Floating upside-down, hairs spread wide like an open palm.
Face relaxed.
Eyes open and clouded.
My dress sprawled around me.
Floral print in a chlorine blue.
And nobody noticed.
Fast forward a month. A year.
The unveiling of a painting of the same moment.
A flat piece of paper in oil and ink guarded and shielded from the word with a velvet curtain.
When they showed me to the world - I watched from my wall.
I watched behind half closed and painted dead eyes.
As men in suits and moustaches, as boys in khakis and sweaters, as gentlemen with hipster shades, and dark brown boots turned to each other and nodded.
“Art.” Someone says. I can barely see them through my cold oiled eyes.
Turtle necks and clipboards. Pens and pencils. Books and glasses. “This is art.”
But the look in their eyes.
Is the same.
As the man who drowned me.
The gallery closes and opens.
Blink.
Open and shut.
Blink.
Until I’m taken down.
Until I’m forgotten, once again.
Suddenly I’m a floating head in a strange universe of concrete.
A concrete wall.
Blue paint spread thin – my image again.
My image – yet the painter doesn’t really know who I am.
I’m just some memory he barely remembers from the metro ad of the press that covered the gallery’s event. I’m just an inspiration of an inspiration of an event that went unnoticed.
I drip a blue and green.
Dead.
In an ecstatic way.
As the man finishes his graffiti he whips out his cock and finishes in the gutter underneath me.
A forever passes.
A man in yellow suspenders drives up in a white city truck.
He takes out a hose and begins to wash away the concrete wall.
Drop after drop – I slowly fade away.
Painless.
There is no pain.
No sensation.
Only nothingness.
I vaguely remember the feeling of dropping down a drain, before everything disappears.
And I’m nowhere.