an encore, only better this time

My father always says keep it simple, write in the first person, but sometimes, the story isn’t about me

Sometimes, it’s yours, told by me

Sometimes, it’s ours, and you don’t want to tell it

I don’t know when a story becomes mine or theirs or no one’s

I suppose the last is easy: when it is forgotten

Not a dusty tome cracking at the spine but a fading whisper in an empty cathedral that patiently awaits a response until it leaves

Often, it’s mine alone to tell and listen to until every character is bored of reciting their lines and having the same thoughts, the ones I doled out like Halloween candy

I nudge them together and watch their mechanical lives play out as if I didn’t carve them and paint on their woeful frowns, joyful smiles, scornful scowls

As if I don’t know the ending, I watch avidly, pick favorites, place wagers on their next moves

Let’s say today they are in a town and tomorrow a village

Now compare the differences

Now tell me why the shade of lavender in the fading sunset— a frame captured, the others dusty periwinkle— matters

I wonder why the curtains are blue, even if I picked that shade from a hundred other similar ones and settled on icy azure because it suited the mood and I was feeling melodramatic

I watch their triumphs, count their losses, brush their dismay off their shoulders like sawdust, because it is

I pretend their story isn’t a reflection of mine, because it isn’t

I pretend I haven’t been moving them all along, because I am

This is my world, I say, so the sky is pink

The clouds have always been suspended cotton balls playing tag against a powder blue sky

Everything pauses, the tin man’s heart stutters

I think it’s over, and the curtain falls