This past weekend, I closed another show. It had been a while since I’d been on stage – two years – and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it: the energy in the dressing room as the clock ticked toward curtain, the palpable excitement in those few, electric moments after “places” are called, waiting in the dark until it’s time to go on. The rush of adrenaline flooding my body when a cue line was dropped, and the sweet relief of recovery when the scene righted itself and moved forward. The utter you-can-hear-a-pin-drop silence when I realized the audience was right there with me, waiting, hanging on every word.

This play, Bare Naked Angels, was markedly different than any other play I’d done before. Autobiographical in nature, more solo performance than ensemble (though, really, a hybrid of both), it featured raw, personal stories from my and the six other cast members’ lives. It was the first time I’d produced a show without reading a script before signing on (our final script wasn’t ready until three weeks before opening night), and I had only a rough idea of the show’s concept and the journey it would take me on when I began.

During the months of workshopping that led up to Bare Naked Angels’ performance dates, my life was hit with a series of jolting events – both good and bad. The closer we got to opening night, the more change swirled in the air around me. It was almost as if by saying yes to this experience, with its leap-without-a-net nature, the universe began to demand more from me. I imagined Madam Universe needling me, saying something like, “Hey kid, don’t think I haven’t noticed what you’ve been doing. Complacency is no longer an option. And if you don’t take action on your own, I’m going to push you into it.”

Push me, she has.  These last few months, my insides have been shifting, a shift that has been echoed in the world around me. I’m not quite sure how to reconcile all I’ve seen and felt and experienced, or how to process what it all means. And to be honest, I haven’t had the time, at least not yet. In the days since the show closed, I have been preparing for an impending office move that will happen while I’m out of town. That’s right – more change – the company I’ve worked at for the last decade is being evicted from our office park, and I’ve been packing up my desk, cleaning, purging, organizing, and attempting to catalogue and archive fifteen years worth of a brand’s history; a history that is inevitably intertwined with my own.

This week, I am thinking about endings. And tomorrow morning, when I settle into my seat on the Boeing 737 bound for the only place I’ve truly ever considered home, I will exhale. I will take some much-needed time. Time to reflect on all that has happened. Time to grieve all that has ended. Time to swim in the sea, time to breathe in the salt air. Time to hug people that I love. And time to listen to what life has been teaching me over these last crazy, chaotic, jolting few months, so that in stillness, I can ask myself that big, looming question, “what’s next?”

Until next time, friends.

(Photo credit:  Instagram.com/AlaskaAir)