When the Play Slips Away

It began in a university hall — the kind that holds echoes. Your seat was at a long trestle table, among young women who may have been students, or actors offstage, or figments summoned for a single scene. You were trying to book tickets, though the play had already begun. Time trembled. No one seemed in a rush.

The lights dimmed — not fully, but enough to blur the edges.

A voice — the narrator’s — rose like incense. Not from a mouth, but from the walls themselves. He began to speak of paintings: still images no one could see, each more elusive than the last. A face that refused to be captured. A gesture that hovered between blessing and warning. You strained to make sense of it, but meaning curled like smoke, suggestive, never solid.

Then the room shifted.

Without rising, you were lifted. Bird’s-eye. Dream’s-eye. The audience remained below, still seated — but you saw the scene tilt and open. Below: a landscape both barren and charged. A scorched trunk, blackened and hollow, its interior wide as a doorway. A crater nearby, deep and round, as if something ancient had fallen — or risen.

No actors moved. No cues were given. And yet, the play had reached its heart. It pulsed in stillness. In absence.

The narrator’s voice thinned, as if drawn into another chamber. You tried to follow, to stay inside the current of meaning. But something was softening. Releasing.

You weren’t being asked to understand.
You were being invited to ungrasp.

Who was visiting? That question rose — not as a puzzle, but as perfume. As presence.

Perhaps the real performance had always been off-stage. Or underground.

Or within. Notitia is a practice of attending.
To dream, to distortion, to what doesn’t resolve.
Stay close to what flickers.

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