Life is Film (2)

Life is Film (2)

Damn. I don’t know why I just said frame. It’s what he would of said. Well, they do say a good therapist must attempt to immerse himself in the emotional realm of the subject. So lets just say picking up a mannerism or two is allowable. Nevertheless, the boy confused me and there was no doubt that he could influence people. I think he knew that. Well, I’m sure he did. But the true power lied in you never knowing.

It’s like when you meet someone for the first time. Things start slow and then build themselves with an invisible set of hands. If it weren’t for the barriers of formality and accepted social conventions, you’d perhaps want to kiss that girl right there and then, talk about characters after a play, rid the inhibitions and go back to her house… He got the feeling that more often than not, people wanted that.

But with that want, lived a haunting predicate: that awkward second, where you just wish you did something different. That awkward second was a repeat offender, and Michael considered it the enemy. But like all enemies worthy of mention, he felt that he had to befriend the enemy to truly get the better.

Inhibition was not for him, and so he used that. He thrived on knowing that if you tore those walls down, life wasn’t just good… It was grand. He relied instead, on a visible set of hands.

He was a patient worth a memoir. A character worthy of memory. He was so good at lying that at times I’ll admit, even I was slightly intimidated. But he made certain that intimidation was met with enjoyment. To him, every new environment was a new set; every new person was an important character and any person worth knowing was a director. To put it succinctly, Michael thought life was a film. That reality was rhythmic, and perhaps more astonishingly, that everybody was acting, all the time. It gave him the excuse to act not one, but many different roles. In fact, he thought that everyone played many characters, and wore different masks for different occasions. He didn’t believe we should be limited to playing one singular individuality. Why couldn’t one practice the art of deception a little more consciously?