Your life is a sitcom. A single camera watches you, and you live in three-quarters of a house. Every day begins the way it has always begun, bouncing along on the heels of a sixty-second song. Your song is catchy in a sickening way, and tells in rhyming couplets your struggles, your fears, and your hopes. It ends on a crashing major chord and the clamor of cymbals.
Your life opens, every day, on a familiar scene, in a familiar room, with familiar faces. Your friends come and go; the wackier ones enter with a flourish and a quip, to cheers and applause. Extras chatter wordlessly in the background. You are the straight-man to the insanity around you. Set-up, punchline, reaction – you know your lines, you know where to pause and when to mug for the camera - your life is a comedy of delightful and deliberately plotted errors.
Claps and laughter, always claps and laughter. The laughter of a desperate audience now fifty years’ dead.
Your life happens in twenty-two minute intervals, with enough time left over for Verizon ads and movie trailers. Enough time for the applause, the forced laughter of your studio audience. Promotional consideration provided by every product you’ve ever owned.
***
My life is a 19-century epistolary novel. I begin and end with formality. I am altogether giddy in my solemnity. To my dear. I am your faithful servant, and I remain, as always, devoted. To you.
I describe in detail the days that pass without you, and you reply in kind. I can recall entire conversations verbatim and I transcribe them for you. Read between my lines and I tell a different story. I use words like ‘vex’. When someone makes love to me, my virtue has not been compromised; I am being courted, I am being wooed.
My plot is a labyrinth of twists and leaps and turns, of strange logic and unexplained coincidence. I am surrounded by aunts and wards, governesses and footmen. Sometimes I am an orphan, sent to work in a desolate country home. I hear noises at night that no one else hears; only I suspect the dark truth, the mad wife in the attic, the ghostly children on the moors. Sometimes I am a young girl of means searching for a suitable husband. I am always plucky and resourceful, though I will often fling myself to the floor dramatically. Often I am overwhelmed, and always overwrought. If I give in to the demands of my mysterious, dark-coated employer I will come to a bad end, as all weak heroines must. If I am pure of heart and loins I will marry in the end, to a man who smiles sweetly at my wild mind.
I live on the moors and I live in the city. If I am good my ending is happy.
***
Their life is a Shakespearian tragedy. His father the King has gone mad. She is a girl glimpsed once and rhapsodized forever. She sings to herself in meadows when she thinks no one is listening. In iambic pentameter they fall in love, and what follows is always the same: blood, song, the awful truth of jesters. His father the King is not really mad. His mother the Queen schemes, and the plot moves forward.
The first act is over.
They speak together in rhyming couplets, harmonizing like singers. They swoon. They are lovers. They meet in forests and the Queen sends her ladies-in-waiting to watch and to listen. The Queen poisons her husband the King, and the Court thinks he has gone mad. The ladies-in-waiting like a Greek chorus echo back what they have heard; the Queen schemes, and the plot moves forward.
So ends the second and third acts. In the fourth the lovers return home. It storms, they are in Iove, they are oblivious. His father the King mutters in the storm. The mad King wishes them well. The ladies-in-waiting die slowly, one by one. ‘Alas and alack!’, they cry, one by one. ‘She will betray!’ The lovers flee in the storm. His father the King wishes them a good morrow. His mother the Queen sharpens her nails and teeth and daggers, and prepares her poisons.
In the fifth act they die. This is the only ending.
***
The stories are always the same. The difference is in their form. I chose a happier form for mine. So long as I am good, my story will end triumphantly. ‘Reader, I married him.’
But – and here is the part where I tell the truth, outside of narrative and form - when the story ends, my life continues. The only constant is death, and though I am the heroine of my story, I will die one day, like every character before me. I don’t want to die like Emma Bovary; I want to die like Elizabeth Bennett, far from my story. I want an unrecorded death. I don’t want to be form without context.
Think about your story. Think about the form that shapes your narrative. This will determine the lines you say, the actions you take. In the end, every life – sitcom, novel, cartoon, silent movie – ends in the formula of tragedy, in death. Life is a Shakespearian tragedy, punctuated by moments of sitcom absurdity. Find your own story between those moments.
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