Theater in the Cloud

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Those were the words that were not spoken but somehow written across my mind. Then the wait. I knew the response but sometimes I just tried to wait it out. To see if the words that I could see as clearly as a black light poster would fade with time. They never did. Not until I spoke the reply.

Why, oh why, a blushing sky? A sky that blushes will say good bye and moments later will start to cry, with tears that drop from way on high.

That was the response that it waited for. Only after those exact words were spoken would the movie start. The curtains, dark, heavy fabric would slowly separate exposing what looked like a pearl white screen. And then, after a melodramatic spanse of time would the images flow.

Never a plot in the normal sense of the word but somehow the images proceeded and told a story. The story, if you could call it that, somehow made perfect sense. Each frame was made up of unrecognizable shapes and colors that flooded my senses the same way independent notes followed each other to create an optical symphony. My body moved like the purple clouds and when the composition was over I was satiated and for a few precious seconds, I understood it. Then, without preamble, the old curtains folded upon them selves once again.

I first found this cinema from an unknown place on a muggy summer evening while standing on the flat asphalt roof of the tenament that I called home. The sounds of the street had the same clarity 18 floors up as they did 18 floors down. The doppler effect of sirens as the ambulances and cop cars played its games and I could tell the paths of the screaming vehicles with my eyes closed. The pollution in this part of the city made the sky look orange and when the factories were up the tall narrow stacks mingles to make the clouds look purple. That was when I saw the blurry image of a theatre seat materialize next to the skylight with glass so caked with grime that the embedded wire couldn't be seen. The seat flickered for a few seconds as if having difficulty deciding on the exact place it would pick.

Oddly, this bizarre apparition had very little effect on me. My perspectives were not normal, at least not compared to people in general. But of course most people were not wandering a roof looking for the best place to launch themselves into a sky that absorbed poisonous waste all day and blushed a contaminated pink against the setting amber sun.

I sat in the theatre chair and thought to myself, what's this all about. That's when I first heard and saw the words and somehow knew the expected response. This first movie, as every one since, seemed to last for hours but in reality took less than a minute. That evening led to another and another and more and more. Five years of unexplainable theatre that kept me alive.

Somehow I know that one night the seat will not appear and I wonder what I will do. Will I simply take up where I left off five years ago? Would tonight be that night? The rain that began to fall as I waited had a different feel and consistency of normal rain. I let my tongue taste the drops that crept down my face and there was a hint of salt. These were tears and that was when I knew that the fulfillment of my response was happening. I opened my eyes and looked towards the skylight and saw a hooded figure blinking in and out of focus and it waved me to it.