Unsettled Places – The Attic Theatre

A place where waiting acquires a shape of its own.

There is a theatre hidden in the roof of a house.

You find it by climbing through a confusion of boxes and forgotten objects that seem to have been stored there by several generations of dreams. Dust hangs in the air. Somewhere below, far below, a film flickers in the darkness.

The seats are almost empty.

Someone sits beside you.

You recognise him immediately, though not in the way waking life recognises people. His face arrives before memory. His presence before explanation.

Ahead of you, another figure occupies the row in front.

Whether he is watching the screen or listening for something behind him is impossible to tell.

The film ends.

Light shifts through the theatre like water passing beneath a door.

An old usher emerges carrying a broom. He moves slowly between the rows, gathering fragments invisible to everyone else. For a while you believe he has not noticed you.

Then he looks up.

Later, when he returns, the broom is gone.

The uniform is gone too.

Something long and dark rests in his hands.

The room seems smaller than before.

The shadows between the seats deepen.

The old man begins speaking, though the words feel older than his mouth.

You rise and move toward the exits.

Every door is locked.

The darkness beyond them appears deeper than the darkness inside.

When you turn back, neither figure has moved.

One waits beside you.

One waits at the aisle.

Neither appears impatient.

The theatre has become a place of waiting.

For what, you cannot say.

The air smells faintly of dust, old timber, and something animal.

Later, drifting between sleep and waking, you become aware of coarse hair spreading across your back. For a moment you inhabit a body that seems to have been waiting beneath your own.

Then the sensation passes.

Morning arrives.

The theatre disappears.

Yet all day you carry the feeling that somewhere above the house, beyond the ceiling and beyond the stored boxes, a forgotten audience remains seated in silence before a screen that never quite goes dark.

Not every threshold asks to be crossed. Some remain illuminated only by the act of returning.

NOTITIA HEALTH
Attending to dreams, psyche, embodiment, and the unsettled places between.