Oscar Wilde

I discovered this week that The Picture of Dorian Gray was written by Playwright Oscar Wilde. This surprised me. Oscar wrote of the complexities of relationships, and I didn't fathom the depths that one character displayed until now.

 It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything."

"The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came--oh, my beautiful love!--and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. Tonight, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played."

"Tonight, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say."

It was only in EMS I lived. I was what they needed. I trained every single day to come and take care of YOU right now in your life. I embrace you as a human, in pain, and lost. I empathize with you. I give. I lost. I sacrificed. 

Then it all looked like rice paper walls and distorted masks of kindness faced to me. 

This feels like the beginning of a long tired night.