Excerpt: No Matter When or Where or Who

My involvement in the world didn't last long. For a few miles, I was awake and shouting nonsense from my passenger seat, desperate to influence the path of the car. But my soul was fatigued; I gave up and sat quietly in my seat again, resigned to the fact that I was merely a passenger to my own life. Had I known where the vehicle was headed, I should have leapt into the drivers' seat, shoving the maniac driver out, and slammed on the brakes (taking care, of course, not to mover the sterring wheel whilst braking). I was leaping off a cliff, but the crash that lay before me would do much worse than kill me.

Patrick, Anwen, and I started meeting frequently to write "our" play. My instinctive cowardice wasted little time in halting my real involvement. Fear, I believe, is what kept me in the passenger seat, what kept me detached from my own life. I help my eyes shut tight throughout the ride, too frightened to see the cliff I was leaping off. And I was terrified of seeing that I was actually the driver, that I might actually be responsible for plunging off a cliff with passengers in tow or leading a caravan of innocents into hell. So I convinced myself that I wasn't really doing anything, that Patrick and Anwen were in control and I had nothing to do with the defiant play.

"Karoline, what do you think?" Anwen asked, sitting up. She had been lying with her legs across my lap on Patrick's couch. Patrick was pacing about his small apartment.

"Well, I--" Anwen had been trying valiantly to include me more in our playwriting, but I didn't really have any ideas.

"You have to have some kind of opinion." She scooted closer to me. I didn't even know what we were talking about. "Everyone has something they want to tell the world, Karoline." My palms were sweating.

"I-- I don't have strong opinions about much. Just go with whatever you guys want."

"Bullshit, Karoline," Patrick laughed. "You firmly believe in isolation and are strongly against socialisation." Anwen sat straight up suddenly, finally taking her legs off me.

"That's it!"

"What?" Patrick and I asked simutaneously.

"It's perfect! See, we can't hire actors, right? And we each have our own differing opinion about a bunch of stuff, right? So then why don't we write a play with three different characters, and we play them? It'll be perfect!" Patrick and I were silent. "C'mon, guys! Karoline's character can be all cynical and anti-social like her--"

"I am not cynical!" I protested."I--"

"You're anti-social because you have cynical ideas about human nature. Anyway, Patrick's character can be kind of bouncing back and forth between optimism and pessimism just like him." Patrick made a face at her judgement. "And I'll-- I'll be me!"

"Frightfully energetic and childish?" Patrick suggested.

"I'm mature for my age," Anwen said matter of factly. "But do you guys like the idea? I think it's perfect!"

"Just not your simplifications of our personalities," Patrick laughed. "But, still, what are we trying to say? That was the question."

"Exactly! Don't you get it? All three characters are trying to say something different. So what we're really saying is that we can't say just one thing because even people working together can't really agree on one thing. We're saying you can't just pronouce some universal truth, that there is no answer to life, no definite path, no--!"

"Actually, I like it," I said. I wasn't quite sure why I said it, but I did. I liked it, yes, but liking something and admitting to it as well required me to at least be pay attention slightly to life; my eyes were shut tight, but I was listening.

"I like it too," Patrick said. "So it's settled. A three-man play with conflicting themes, all tying together under the theme of conflicting themes!" And thus our play officially began, and I was stuck as a key part of it.