And I perform anyway

Even though the curtains stay closed. 

There is something sacred about an empty theatre after all.

Not the kind of empty that feels abandoned. Not the hollow silence of a place forgotten. But the kind of empty that holds its breath. That leans in. That knows something is about to happen, even if no one has come to watch.

I have been performing here for years.

Not for applause. Not anymore. Maybe long ago, there was a time I stood at the edge of this stage and hungered for it. The recognition. The comments. The emails from strangers who felt seen in my words. The particular vanity of knowing that what you wrote moved someone enough to reach across the darkness toward you. I fed on that once. I am not ashamed to admit it.

But somewhere between then and now, between the girl who searched for synonyms to make her sentences shine and the woman who no longer needs to, something changed. The hunger softened into something stranger. Something that looks almost like devotion.

I write now the way some people pray. Not because they expect an answer. But because the silence that follows feels different from all other silences. Charged. Intimate. Like something is listening even when nothing stirs.

I speak into it. This enormous, breathing quiet. Words that are too honest for the outside world. Feelings that would embarrass me in daylight. Grief that I have not named yet and love that I have named too many times. I lay them all out here, on these boards, in this light that is barely a light at all.

And the empty theatre receives everything.

It does not flinch. It does not judge. It does not shut me down, the way the world sometimes does, swiftly, without explanation. The theatre just holds it. All of it. The beautiful and the unbearable. The poem I wrote at 3AM that I will never fully explain. The story about a young girl falling in love anyway. The weight of watching the world outside burn while I sit here, helpless, stringing sentences together like they are prayers I cannot stop making.

But I know this. There is a particular kind of beauty in the performance no one asked for. In the song sung to no audience. In the painting made in a room with the door closed. In the words written at midnight by someone who is not sure anymore if they are writing for others or just to prove to themselves that they are still here. Still feeling. Still capable of turning the ache of living into something with a shape.

And hence, even if the curtains remain closed, the show is always worth watching!