Juliet
When they told me I would be casted as Romeo, the feelings I had for Jane were far off from where it first started. I mean, I choose to do the test because of Jane and the kiss, but as I could get an approach from her, all I could think was that love was just a shakespearean frail dream. Jane was still one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, sure... but then I thought friendship was I all I had to gain of her. She was smart. I doubt I could ever know how wise and quick-witted she is.
One day, walking her to her house, we were talking all the way to her home and she surprised me of how much one can know about whales. She seriously likes whales. I could deduct that if someone takes the monopoly of conversation to express all the knowledge it knows about a specific topic in a 15 minutes conversation, I take that person needs a friend. Maybe to learn how to unload their feelings, to know more about how talks follows a scrutinized script.
But I was wrong. Jane is a genius, that is true, and being a genius comes with all of that baggage. This was mostly perceived in school, when she walked alone through the corridors not carrying of how anyone will look at her. It was like if she was planning every movement. This kind of cold planing and rebulking presence around insecure teenagers is beyond any setting of social parameters. My friends think we got closer because she liked me, but I think she likes to be feared. When I didn’t know much about her, I was starting to fall for her. When I heard her engagement in the drama club and of how she was brilliant, I decided I should not cower and ingress in that club as a chance to approach her. Nothing could have prepared me for a Juliet that was too busy to need a Romeo. During the preparation she could not be spotted until her queue would come. Then she would majestically present her role and leave the scene as if she was born doing drama. Even, Mr Phillips, the director, was baffled by her natural talent. By the time I got to the test I was so insanely in love that I couldn’t afford not to get the leading role of Romeo. I don’t remember how was the test. All I could remember was passing out after delivering the last sentence. My friends told me that my dismay was so convincing that I got the role. I could already anticipate the possible disaster of enacting the same faux pas in front her. That leaded me to a whole new feeling. A crysis. Love turned to hate. In some manner, everything related to her made me sick. And since all of the past weeks till then were about how could I turn my obsession to reality, I had been trapped inside a love-hate circuit. At morning, I was morbidly imagining how I could die in front of the audience, using real poison starring a real tragedy, but at the school just a simple appearance of her infused presence lightened my heart and I was in love again. When at home, at bed, I remember all I could do was cry myself to sleep. It was like that until one week before the night of the debut, when I decided to come clear and tell her all my feelings and how I had decided to left all of that behind and was hoping to keep up with some kind of friendship. She told she knew I was in love with her. She could tell it by the way I always excluded the kissing scene from the rehearsals. I knew the scene by heart, I have been rehearsing that kiss in the theater of my mind. You kiss by the book, she would have told me, and we would go on. Probably my heart would skip a beat or I would pass out. Or maybe pass away. Then I told her: not anymore, I don’t think I am in love. She told me I have learned something most of the adults knew, that love is but a trap. She kissed me. By the book. I mean, real soft lips touching of a kiss. The day after I felt enchanted and living like a dream, just imagining how thrilling it would be to have that tender lips pressed against mine again. I couldn’t eat that day, I couldn’t barely think. But none of that was concerning.
The night of the debut came and everything went fine as planned, until the kissing scene. I think I broke the spell of passion that same moment. The expected kiss hadn’t any effect other than hot breathing. Then I realized she was nervous. For the first I saw her fragilized in front of me. She told me afterwards she had some kind of stage fright that night. By the time we had to die and enact our final gesture of the grandiosely composed romance, I wasn’t feeling passion anymore.
As the curtain came down, I remember that laying there, seeing the curtain fabric approaching the ground, I was involuntarily grinning, imagining if what I disclosed was the true nature of love itself.
