within the enclosure of darkened theater nights and familiar dark blue doorways … i watch with hesitant emotion … hiding in dark cloth, an easily tilted hat that hints at my strange psychology with this town … personal identity is complicated at this hour, where i exist as an entity in a crowd, rather than an individual in a room … something i must always point out to myself … that i am removed here and i do not belong … i insist to myself their simple ways are not a part of me and never were … ridiculous comparisons of personal talents and present conquests swirl together with the cheap creamer, dissolving in a caffienated wonder of insecurity … i am wondering if this small town air is too light for me or too heavily a past closet skeleton, waiting … too familiar and subconsciously buried on nights like this very one … a necessary precaution for young girls: strategic hands over skirts, covering places fiercely between my thighs, i have more here to lose than most … where the air is so weighted in expectation and a lingering scent of a deterministic future … predictability … she will marry, have two children, inherit her father’s cornfields, so on and so forth … but there are still dreams in this room … sparkling eyes glance back and forth as a mother’s child sings in mediocre flashes of confidence, sterile movement in glitter dress … she is bare to me even beneath her clothing on that stage … her nervous hesitation reflects my own here in the viel of the crowd … we both had something to prove to these village people at one time or another … i remember her from past school days, she probably does not remember me … i don’t know why that matters to me … or why it becomes an odd curiosity that yes, there are still dreams here, they just aren’t mine anymore …