Night Terrors

"Nothing's gonna harm you, not while I'm around..."

Last night, I spent four and a half hours walking around downtown, from around 10:30pm to 3:15am.  I saw groups of guys walking around, riding skateboards, screaming, and at one point I even thought they were yelling at me.  The cops picked some of them up, and I was afraid they would pick me up, too.

After all, I had been aimlessly walking for hours.

I almost wanted something to shake me out of my funk.  I wanted my heart to beat hard, adrenaline to pump my veins, tears threaten to spill down my cheeks...  I wanted to run.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted to stand on the top of a building and scream triumph out to the world.

Am I selfish?  Maybe.

"Nothing's gonna harm you, no sir, not while I'm around..."

Despite all the assurances in my life, despite every person around me telling me over and over that I'm worth it, I'm loved––why is it never enough?

Why can't I believe those words?  Because maybe, maybe I hear them whispered in the dark, in tunnels, spoken through lying lips by people who want to trap me.  Maybe I'm like Toby*, giving love out to people and promising to protect them, hoping I'll get the same in return––when in reality, someone is just waiting to kill me.

No, no, no.  It isn't true.  It isn't true.  The girl sits in the bathtub, trying to breathe, trying not to drown.  It's okay, it's okay, she whispers.  Let it go, she tells her trembling fingers as they refuse to obey her.

What is it like, living this strange nightlife?  What is it like, living with the knowledge that people come into your life and then drop you when they discover more interesting things?  What is it like, knowing you have f*cked several friends up alongside yourself, and for that you won't ever be forgiven?

The mirror is hazy.  She washes her hands frantically, trying to calm herself down.  She hears her friends out in the living room, laughing, talking, having fun.  Relax, she whispers.  It's okay.  But it's not.  She knows it's not because there are tears on her cheeks.  It's 1:30am, and there's no one she can call to talk to.  Shaking, she wipes her face and leaves the bathroom. 

I'll tell you what it is like.  It's going for a five hour walk in the dark hours of the morning in the middle of downtown.  It's leaning up against a building at 3:00am, trying not to fall asleep, but not wanting to go home and be alone.

It's watching cars slow down when they see you, and wondering if you should run, or stay where you are and take your chances.  It's loving the beat of your heart against your chest when you're scared because that means you're alive.

It's wanting to scream.  It's wanting to write words with blood.  It's wanting to create something out of pain.  It's wanting to give love, and receive love in return.  And not just receive it, but feel worth receiving that love.

It's wanting to lose all the guilt you carry inside your chest like a suffocating weight that punishes you any time you start to feel happy.

It's 2:30am.  A cop car slowly circles the block.  The girl stays where she is, leaning up against a brick building.  If the car picks her up, what can they do?  She isn't breaking any laws.  She is tired, but her mind is alive, alive, alive.


Artists are cursed, I guess.  They are the dreamers.  The plagued.  The gifted.  The shunned.

But with our demons, we create art, do we not?  For dusk belongs to the creatures of the night, and an artist is such a creature.

-An Artist


**Toby from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.  
     What can I say?  I'm a BFA Major.

Scotland, Theatre, and Other News!

So, my lovelies, I have been absent for a while.  But a lot has been happening.

First of all, The Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland: the biggest fine arts festival in the world.  Hardin-Simmons University Theatre Department (my school) is taking a play to perform in August, entitled "The Shadow Box".  Beautiful, beautiful show.  And I am honored to say I have been cast.

So, Scotland.  This is a chance in a lifetime to go to one of the places I have longed to visit, and perform theatre, nonetheless!

However.  Funds are pretty low, and cost is pretty high.  There is a neat little gadget on the sidebar that will allow people to donate to my GoFundMe.  If you don't want to donate [that's totally fine] consider telling other people, or people who have a love of theatre and/or travel.  Every dollar helps.  Sharing helps get the word out.


Here is the link straight to the webpage for my GoFundMe:
https://www.gofundme.com/ReaganDyer


Also, I'm on the HSU Webpage [shown below] where you can also donate if you would rather: http://fund.hsutx.edu/site/TR/Events/General/705957980?pg=team&fr_id=1231&team_id=1354

Reagan Dyer is a junior BFA Acting candidate, Honors minor from Evant, Texas and works in the HSU Theatre Scene Shop. She recently was seen in Check Please and was the assistant stage manager and lighting designer of the HSU production of Trevor. She has been seen in the HSU production of Hay Fever, The Prophet Darla, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, DirectFest 2014, DirectFest 2015, Sweeney Todd and Sense and Sensibility. She was the  light board operator and assistant stage manager for Abilene Live Theatre’s first summer season in 2015. She is the Chaplain of Alpha Psi Omega Honorary Dramatic Fraternity.

The Night Circus

The Circus left that night.

In the darkness—out of all the countless tents that morning—only the Big Top remained, its red and white stripes showing gray in the dim moonlight.  It was drained of color.  Clouds scudded across the sky, casting strangely shaped shadows along the ground—curving and rippling, seeming to rise up from the grass to grope the surroundings. 

Everything had been packed up—vendor’s booths, animal tents, performer’s tents, wagons, trollies—disappearing under the fabric of the big tent.  It was almost like magic.

Nothing breathed that night.  It was quiet; the type of quiet that makes shivers crawl along your skin, or perhaps the kind of quiet that suffocates you.  That is to say, it was not a good quiet.

In the thickness of the dark, unseen by any, a huge cloud left its track in the sky and descended toward the open field where the tent stood, alone.  It came closer and closer, billowing and getting bigger and thicker before finally settling right above the Big Top.  It hung there from an invisible string, the unseen puppeteer using a master’s touch.  Then it enveloped the tent, coming down to the ground and wrapping around it until the tent could no longer be distinguished in the thick whiteness.

Slowly, carefully, the cloud rose back up, higher and higher, carrying the tent within it.  Farther into the sky it flew, until one couldn’t separate it from the other clouds.

The night sky hadn’t changed.  It was the same as ever.  Clouds puffed and evolved into odd configurations; a dragon, an ice cream cone, a trolley flitting across the pockmarked face of the moon.

And one looked rather like a very large Circus tent.

The Circus had gone.

The 777 Challenge: An excerpt from The Nameless Novel

So, I was tagged by the phenomenal Samantha Chaffin for the 777 challenge [check out her writing, now.]  The 777 challenge works like this: you post 7 lines that are found on page 7 of your current novel-in-progress, and then you tag 7 bloggers.

Well.  I break rules.  So I'm posting seven lines found on page seven of chapter TWO in my novel, instead of chapter one.  Because I do things like that.

So this is an excerpt from The Nameless Novel [as I like to call it] because it has no name.  Yet.

Usually, I start out with a name for a novel before I even start writing.  I work from the name up [i.e., The Lightcatcher].  A name ferments in my head, going round and round, before finally demanding that I tell its story.

So this novel has really been frustrating for me because I cannot think of a name.  I just know that a story started forming under my fingertips, nameless, and I had to capture it.


It has the same feel as The Lightcatcher, which is to say it has ocean and wind and sky [because deep in my heart, I long to live in a place like that].  But there are no sentinel balloons or islands or redheaded boys who are strangely enticing.

Instead, there are horses.  And a boy.  And a beach girl with long tangled hair.

Passion, Life, Loud Music

What drives you?  What pursues you?  What thoughts invade your sleep, your dreams, make you wake up in the morning, make you sleepless at night?  What is the reason you cry, you laugh, you love, you breathe.

What is the reason you live?

Today in dance, we were talking about music and how it hits you, and the beat hits you, and you can feel it in your veins.  Music, for me, is more than just pleasant listening material.  I want to feel it.  I want to become the song.  I want to soak my body in its rhythm.

When I'm upset or angry or frustrated or so full of passion I think I'm going to scream if I don't let it out, I turn up my radio in the car and blare it so that I can barely focus on driving.  All I feel is that moment, that anger, that pain.  And at that moment, honestly, I'm not sure that I would care if a semi hit me head-on.

There Was a Princess

"She lived in a castle with birds flying about, day and night, carrying their music in from the surrounding mountains.  She was not a frail, milk-skinned princess as most were won't to think princesses should be.  The mountain air had seeped into her bones from the time she was a little child, feeding her with a love for wild things: a wolf’s howl on the full moon, a Lark’s song on a summer morning, the screech of an eagle as it dives for its prey.  She was lithe, with ruddy cheeks and tangled hair, and her legs were browned from the sun.

"A proper princess indeed.

"Nobody really knew her real name, except for her parents, because everybody called her Rose.  She spent so much time running about in the woods, among the trees and wild things, and plaiting flowers into her hair that she didn’t look a bit like she belonged with a Proper Name.  Rose fit her much better. 

"All day long she dreamed of faraway places, exotic princes and kings, the feeling of a strange mountain’s mist upon her face, a foreign land’s dirt beneath her feet.  With her head full of cobwebs and stars it was a wonder that she ever learned anything.  Every day, when she was convinced to come inside, her tutors had to brush the tangles from her mind with a special little brush.  But every day they gathered again: pictures of tropical birds, colorful plants, lavish spices, faraway ships going to faraway places…  And each time she dreamed, the urge in her little chest to see the world grew stronger and stronger until she thought she might burst from the pure wanting of it.

"I should know.  For that little girl was me."

Pain

I want to write a post on pain.  Why?  Because I've experienced it.  Details are too many and too personal to write down in one blog post.  I haven't had an awful life.  I had a wonderful childhood [despite being brought up with serious body-image issues] and I'm happy.  I'm in college, in love with my major, surrounded by supporting friends.

That being said, however, I have gone through pain.  At this point in my life, the taste of pain is very familiar on my tongue.  And I say that because it's true, not because I'm screaming for attention.  Recently, an event in my life took my heart, chewed it up, and spit it back into the school semester.  It was hard to deal with.  It was painful to deal with.  And I'm still trying to come to terms with it.

But I've learned a lot through it: