Imagine looking through a window at any environment that is particularly significant to you. Reflect on the scene, paying close attention to the relation between what you are
seeing and why it is meaningful to you. Please limit your statement to 300 words.
Light thickens around the cold stone church. Skirting its edges and corners, veiled by night, I reach the window into the basement, set low into the wall, practically at ground level. No noise comes from within, and so I stoop, cup my palms over my eyebrows, and squint through the grille at my empty stage.
There was a time when I stood on that worn wooden floor, its boards scarred with masking tape, flanked by a polished lectern and a statue of the Virgin Mary. I was the King of Scotland, and my hands were coated in a coagulation of corn syrup and red food coloring, though if you had been sitting in one of the seats facing the stage you would have instantly mistaken it for blood. I once stood clasping the hands of my friends and grinning like a little boy at the sound of applause. And there was a kind of belief that filled me in the cold stone church that had nothing to do with God, though it had everything to do with heaven.
One pious, faithful Catholic shuffles into the room, clatters about near the set pieces propped serenely against the far wall, and plunges the underground theater into darkness. And where there was a room there is now only myself, reflected by the light of two isolated street lamps, staring back at me out of the pane of glass two feet from my face. Dressed in strange and foreign clothes, my reflection flashes me a sly grin that is not my own, and I fleetingly believe, as others have, that I am not myself. It feels glorious, this pretending, and I give my strange reflection an affirmative nod as, breathing in, I rise.
