ArtFlow

She'd been playing the same character for four years. Not on stage — in life. The capable one, the together one, the one who had it figured out. It had started as a performance and somewhere along the way she'd forgotten that it was one.
The show she was actually in — a small production at a small theater that not many people came to see — closed on a Saturday night. She took her bow, changed out of her costume, said goodbye to the cast in the way you do when everyone knows they won't all see each other again. Then she went back to the empty stage and sat down on the floor.
She didn't do it for any particular reason. She just wasn't ready to leave.
The theater was completely quiet. The kind of quiet that has texture to it — you can feel it against your skin. She sat in it and tried to remember the last time she'd been in a room with no one watching her, no role to play, no version of herself to maintain.
She thought about the character she'd been performing — the capable one. She tried to separate what was real from what was constructed and found it harder than expected. Four years is a long time. Some of the performance had become true. Some of the true things had become performance. She wasn't sure anymore which was which.
She stayed until the cleaning crew came. Then she got up, put on her coat, and walked out into the night feeling lighter and more uncertain than she had in years — which, she decided on the walk home, was probably a good sign.