You wake up in your trailer halfway through the day because you are not needed again until afternoon. You are not top of the call sheet. That spot’s for Kate Winslet who plays Clementine. It is now the afternoon, and you will go film a scene with Mark Ruffalo, who is nicer than you thought he’d be. Quiet, maybe awkward, but kind. The makeup team will smudge your mascara so you look tipsy. The hair team will carefully ruffle your blonde shoulder-length-cut. You will film a scene in which you dance over Jim Carrey’s sleeping body in your underwear. Mark Ruffalo will also be in his underwear. You will be Mary, and Mark will be Stan, and Jim will be Joel, and you will dance as if you are alone except there is a crew of men watching you do it. As Mary, you will work for a doctor that erases people’s memories, and you will try to kiss your married boss. As Mary, you will be told that you have done it before, but you have no memory of it. You don’t remember because you didn’t want to remember, but you ended up here anyway. You do not change. Spin of a ceiling fan, will always end up just where you started. You do not have cool hair like Clementine, you are just a girl who tried to give herself a second chance and failed. You will wish you had loved Stan, but you will always choose what you cannot have. Your director will call cut, you will change out of Mary’s plain clothes and lab coat, and you will go home to the apartment you live in for only three months. Sleep will come with dreams of snowy beaches and crumbling houses, featureless faces and your static-warped voice: this will be the last time.
Ally Feisel is a poet from Mountain Top, PA. She received her undergraduate degree in Creative Writing from Hamilton College, where she was awarded the Thomas E. Meehan Prize and George A. Watrous Literary Prize. Her work is forthcoming in Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose.
Image: “Shadows in Snow I” from The Dollar Store Estate Sale
Pine Hills Review 