All The World's A Stage

In the utter eternity before a night's unveiling, where the endless trepidation mounts to near nuclear hysteria, we find ourselves in that moment of solace where quiet reflection is a stolen whisper on the wind that's quailing before the tempest of the night. Seizing these moments with the utmost delicacy finds us envisioning the countless sins we shall embark upon in the following hours. We doll up the direst parts of ourselves; actors on the stage of the world, playing the part we want all the humble plebeians to be enamored by. So it goes, in the horrorshow madness of this manic desire to lose ourselves in the faux mirror reflections of our quasi-selves-- a doppelganger of the night. Looking identical, breathing with the same bodily faculties, yet an insidious light gleans in the eyes, and thus we may say "the mask is on".

The act that follows shall be played up with a Dorian Gray-esque innocence, howling the deteriorating evils behind the facade of our “evening’s mask”. Seizing all in the hyperbolized debauch of ecstasy, fueling the shells of ourselves with untamed ferocity into the rocks of the world, crushing all around us in the tsunami of our desires. The world turns tremulous with the backwards edicts we evoke, and it all crumbles as the dawn rises, melting with it our new “faces” and reigning in the devastation.

Morning comes with the amnesia. Bewildered we find the aftermath of our nocturnal activities strew around us post-usage–we are the sole survivors. Naked as the day is new, a twisted rebirth into the decaying rot of the nightlife. Guilt hammers us down into enfeeblement just long enough to chip away at the gilded armor that shelters us through the night, and yet it recedes into non-being as the day dies, and thus the cycle renews again. Only our innards, the soul of our being bears the true scars of this implosion of self.

The portrait remains the background in the play.