pigeon

not th'inconstant moon!!!

Juliet, in her sixties, dignified with wrinkles and conservatively salon-done hair stacked neat and tall atop her head, leans carefully but passionately out over the balcony and explains to the vines and saplings in the garden below why they shouldn’t swear on the moon.

O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

Not th'inconstant moon! she repeats, Missouri bootheel drawl accentuating her consternation.

Her audience, due to adolescence dumb as Romeo, will require further explanation.

The moon has cycles; it waxes and wanes. Through librarian-grade glasses she watches for signs of comprehension. If you’re trying to prove your love is constant and unwavering, you wouldn’t swear by something that constantly changes!

A breeze stirs the garden; the classroom windows to the east are verdant. Those of us who are listening absorb this fertilizing crumb of information into our root systems. It has to do with love; it may yet prove important.

This careworn Juliet morphs back into my ninth grade English teacher, and begins going over the casting assignments for our upcoming in-class performance.

Where she just went, what courtyard of memory she has risked the side effects of time travel to visit, for our sakes, to bring back the authenticity that animates her interpretation, we, ensconced in the self-absorption of youth, literally can’t imagine. It would never even occur to us to try to imagine.

I don’t have to be Romeo, thank god. Two years ago in this same classroom, my brother did. He wanted to be Mercutio, because Mercutio is cooler, but Mrs. Huckabee (not Huckleberry! she clarifies on day one) made him be Romeo. Now, she wants me to be Romeo too, but I petition. The problem is (she explains in an aside) I’m one of the few who can actually read the lines without sounding like a robot. (It’s true; some of my classmates sound like broken robots.) And Mercutio is worm’s meat by 3.1.113, meaning she'll have not much to listen to besides a robotic Romeo for the rest of the play. I am sympathetic, but not sufficiently; I persist; she relents. “I don’t want to continue a legacy of heartbreak for your family,” she sighs. I get to be Mercutio!

Enthusiastically my frenemy — let’s call him Etac — and I start planning how we're going to play the fight scene. It’s freaky how perfectly suited he is for the part of Tybalt. He has that squinty midwestern too-comfortable suburban smirk about him. It is gonna be epic! I will throw my chest out and say Tybalt, you ratcatcher, will you walk? We will hop up and leap from chair to chair. We will make this bandying in Verona streets so real, it will be like time has stopped for the rest of the robots in the classroom. And then I will have a showstopping death scene.

But that shifty little king of cats betrays me. He is “sick” on the day of Act 3, so there's no drama, no prancing about, no animated tomfoolery. Just me, dispiritedly reading my lines against a stand-in, or rather a sit-in as whoever gets assigned to read Tybalt in Etac’s absence doesn't even bother to stand up. It sucks and is pointless.

So there you have it. Juliet is an old southern english teacher lady. Tybalt stays home on the day of the fight, so Romeo (some kid I don’t remember) can’t kill him to avenge my death. Tybalt grows up to be a band director and run a music store, and I don’t know what all else. He has a life.

Mercutio has to settle for getting killed by bloodless words. This will not do, ’tis not enough. ’Twill not serve. Words never suffice. You have to feel the rapier slide in between the ribs, with just the right amount of friction. Denied my proper death, I live as Mercutio’s sallow ghost for many years. Avoidance. Self imposed alienation. Escape. Progressive bullshit. It’s easier to laugh at love than die for it. But — haha! — I died for it anyway.

I guess you’re expecting me to sign off with a “plague o’ both your houses!” But I’m not. That was the old me. The one that died. This new me lives, lives for love and chaos and a second chance to play a different part — O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with me, too, after all! She was there in the elevator with me when the door clambered shut and we started flying sideways, in the dark, mildly terrified, claustrophobic, beginning to suspect, forcing our eyes open, willing ourselves to be awake — but that’s a whole ’nother nightingale — I mean lark — I mean pigeon, of course.