Audition

by Katie Kitamura

More and more often, I was surprised by the person in the mirror, it was not the lines at my mouth or the hollowness around my eyes, it was the lag in recognition that was the most troubling, the brief moment when I looked in the mirror and did not know who I was.

had never seen his face so devoid of familiarity, as if he were a vessel that had been upended, everything that made him himself trickling to the floor.

Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible. You observe yourself, you watch yourself act, you hear yourself speak, a line that is articulated and then articulated again, and the meaning that is produced is at once entirely real—as it is experienced on stage, as it is experienced by the audience—and also the predictable result of your craft, the choices you have made, the control that cedes freedom. I stand on the stage. I look out into the audience, which is full, the kind of house that Xavier must have dreamed of, possibly from the very start. Xavier, whose ambition has the depth and power of my own.