Four Love: Act Four

Act Four

Inside a small, antiquated public house in a village town. Many people standing around the bar, and some sitting on chairs around tables. Interior is mahogany decorated, a fireside burning wood in the corner.

Enter Identity

Identity The self is a bundle of associations kept in memory across time’s duration. It has many layers that reveal themselves during dream. My fortress holds the key to perception and consciousness; a matter of reality for the proprietor.

Enter Agape, Eros, Storge & Philia 

Agape Very bust tonight. Let’s walk over to that table by the fireside that has that one person sitting by themselves. Looks like they need some company.

Storge Seems like a sensible idea.

Eros, Philia We’ll follow your lead.

(They walk over and sit next to Identity)

Philia What is your good name? I am Philia, and this is Agape, Eros and Storge.

Identity I am Identity. You could imagine me as a complex algorithm that requires unlocking, or a simple puzzle that just needs putting together. Without me you are lost. With me, and you can realise the highest state of your being. I can be charitable or egregious, selfish or selfless. It all depends on the nature of your perception and how you live your consciousness.

Storge I came in here for a relaxing evening with some common folk, and here we are, meddling with Identity.

Eros It’s a matter of Identity, parading itself as obsequious arrogance. If we tap into the web of conceit, will there be any changes to your confidence?

Identity I’ve been known to crumble before. Eros, you are mighty sceptical. Have you suffered from the illness of impregnable fear and had past experiences that you’d rather get rid of?

Eros I take that as a rhetorical question. We’ve all faced the harrowing emptiness that sucks up thoughts and leaves you in a paralysed, dizzied position crawling for a safety net.

Storge A shadow play of nightmares, paranoia creating double indemnity and a chip on your back. Carrying dead weight around, slumping to your knees; these are the effects that internalised and bottled up feelings create when not communicated.

Philia It’s why friends exist as counterparts, removing emotional blockages and opening the valve, letting out hot steam every once in a while, to cleanse the palette of muddy waters.

Identity Sensitive, though I am, to others opinions about myself and how I function in accordance with society’s wishes, I grow ripe when left in favourable conditions, free of materials ties, and suffer under strenuous, pressurised situations where I am expected to behave in a certain fashion.

Agape You seem very fragile, like glass that has been tempered with and is easily broken when cared for by someone with no prior experience. A soft shell that can be opened, like a peach’s skin torn asunder by insatiable fingers.

Enter Doctor

Doctor This table looked lively from the entrance. May I be able to join this party?

Storge Of course you may.

Eros Let me guess your occupation. Would it be something connected to healthcare? Like bees making honey from nectar, the nurse and the doctor mend hearts and broken wounds in a collective hive called a hospital.

Doctor So sure you are, and yet so right. Clairvoyance being one of your traits, I take it? Some have the ability to see through another person, others completely forecast the future, like when it is going to rain or that an accident is going to take place that day. I am Doctor, caring for the sick and tirelessly stepping in for others. Always on duty, as it is a human right to help one another, don’t you feel?

Philia I feel, Doctor. Sometimes feelings can lead to broken hearts, when put in misunderstanding’s conjecture and not listening to your own body telling you how to maintain it and what to regulate. I hold the opinion that most maladies can be prevented, if healthy eating, regular exercise and plentiful water are imbibed on a frequent basis.

Doctor You could work in my hospital! That is of the same opinion as most in my profession.

Identity As someone who heals the sick and disaffected, would you be able to patch up multiple personality disorders?

Doctor I strictly deal with physiological illnesses and occasionally psychosomatic ones. The psychological ‘disorders’, as you phrase it, are a specialist branch that is handled by others. I find comfort in pursuing purposeful work that mediates between the layers of the conscious mind.

Agape It comes truly to the question of what is the meaning of life? Is it a question that cannot be answered in one word or sentence?

Identity The limits of my world are the limits of my language. Silence is golden. Between each breath that is exhaled and inhaled, is the spirit that transcends all reality. We strive for meaning within set confines and imagine the rest without a compass to guide us.

Philia Therefore people are led astray and get lost in a vast expanse, trying to retrace their footsteps, finding that their senses have been too refined to think outside the box.

Agape Like the parable of the blind men and an elephant, we all touch a certain part of the elephant whilst in complete darkness and form our hypothesis of what reality is. We take up many different personalities across our ages, from scrawny teenager to under-achieving 30-something. There is a common thread that can weave realisation, in that behind the physical changes of our bodies, our souls are kindred, genial and almost the same from the cradle to the grave. We colour perception with concepts, ideas and thoughts; once these are removed, it is the same uninhibited way of seeing as a child would look at a leaf for the first time. That newfound sense of wonder!

Doctor I have experienced this myself whilst operating on a patient.

Agape Expand please, if you will.

Doctor As an incision was being made onto the left shoulder, blood poured in reminiscence of nostalgia at when my brother had a cut from his shin when I was four. It was my earliest memory of when I saw blood leave a human body.

Storge Such flashbacks do take us on a journey to self-discovery. The sense of smell is particularly foreboding for trips into my childhood. First impressions do count.

Doctor Thank you ladies and gentleman for a fascinating conversation. I’ll be heading home now to give my mind a break. Good night!

All Good night Doctor!

Exit Doctor

Identity The doctors of ancient times used to be able to treat any sort of sickness. Nowadays, division of labour has made everyone an expert at one field and a complete amateur at anything else. An all-encompassing individual has a breadth of skills and knowledge at their disposal, being able to dynamically apply themselves in any situation, like a Swiss knife used by a handyman.

Eros A jack of all trades or a master of none.

Storge Inadequacy stops most from feeling out their natural characteristics, orienting themselves towards economic and social functions that strip away, what in fact, they are best at, reducing them to cogs in a wheel acting under the council of supervision, looking for the next promotion.

Eros If we recognise our flaws, talk about them openly, and have a positive form of interaction with our closest circles, passion flows and the attitude to achieve something greater than the immediate needs, all animals tend to, will be ignited.

Philia Dreary eyes, waking up at sunrise, a lack of motivation and an impending dread at the day ahead sets the scene for mendacity, complicity and unhappiness. Energy reduced to a commodity that can be bought at a cheap price is a symbol of being tethered by a slim and tender rope.

Agape Failure to act on behalf of yourself is tantamount to suicide. Taking responsibility for your own actions, being honest and accountable for them, and admitting to mistakes are all fertilisers of a peaceful conscience; a human right, let’s say.

Identity An identity crisis is a search for meaning, purpose and will. We engineer everything in our lives to conform to our desired wishes, yet these are fabricated and end up not being satisfactory at all. Release yourself from the control centre and plug into that which makes you whole.

Agape Certainly agree with you Identity. You make life possible to us all.

Eros The fusion of souls across unknown destinies is spell-binding poetry.

Philia The only certainty is uncertainty. Chaos and disorder rule.

Storge Love is what it all amounts to.

Exit Storge, Philia, Eros & Agape

Identity Hearts melted by the fireside, and I discovered myself.

Exit Identity

Curtain

An act of womanly courage: Scene five

Reasons not to die. Primrose hasn’t found any yet. Endless lists and diary entries inundate her troublesome occupation of keeping up with her running, pacing mind. She can’t stand not being able to be in control of herself. Miss Maya orders her life to near perfection and becomes obdurately obsessed with every action, behaviour and emotion that she exhibits. She feels that there is nothing in life so she satisfies herself with orgasmic habits and cheap pleasantries from an ever-burgeoning plastic temperament. Primrose scours for solace in the popular media to fit into society and clothe herself in temporary relief to stop reminding herself of how scared she is. She starts to imitate leading femme fatales and tries to regurgitate the acts of seduction that successful women have elicited. A strict career path proves auspicious from the distraught suffering and irremediable sorrow, maimed in buckets of tears. Her ideal life of leading a romantic, artistic and beautiful existence has been shattered into splinters that she has stepped on indelibly, never to return back to her innocent, youthful days of dreaming about poetic love. Her once cheerful smile has turned wistful and the wrinkles surmount in despondency over the decline of her body’s beauty with time. Primrose scrambles to retrieve happy memories in childhood with her dad’s affection counting the most. Immediately, she remembers the horrible moment of puberty with growing breasts and shedding blood form her uterus and wishes that she never grew up to turn into an adult. She becomes incredibly sensitive and timid to anything that could potentially shed light on her emotional state. Jealousy and suspicion keep her in a fit of fear, as her temperament disowns its own irascible merit. Primrose turns her remarks into sarcastic bursts of scorn and malice to keep an ostensible air of invisibility. By hurting others with hate, she looks to turn them over into obsequious love. Her playful tactics reveal a veil of misfortune that ensnares her capabilities to be empathetic and trusting to anyone. A bond of servility is needed with lustful guile as her defensive mechanisms abound in protection of her valorous traits. Eventually she pounces on a prey with courage and traps his heart to marry and provide communion, however she’s never free from herself, bound in chains forever like an enslaved princess.

Exit.

An act of womanly courage: Scene four

A midsummer’s night dream commences: Puck picks a lyre to string the strum of determinate conquest and blind selection of effeminate affection. Miss Maya is ever more acutely aware of her seclusion with time’s enemy gnawing in her breast, weighing a tonne caroused with corrosive sulphuric acid that chains her rechargeable battery to an erosion of life span. Her meditation upon a lost, erased memory brings forth ideas surged with guilt as the porous membrane lets through cobwebs of doubt amassed by bullying, viscous attacks and fake compliments. She develops a frightfully sardonic sense of humour and mirrors every recollected image with a distempered chromium layer of sealed remorse. The disposition treads wildly in oscillations that Byron would be proud of. Primrose starts to question her sanity with the answers being questions that eat up her soul. Al she wants is a sweet tender kiss, an affirmation of eternal love and a partner to share her secrets with. She concludes that there is no joy in being constantly alone. Desperation mounts and nightmares dictate a change in shape and expectations, developing a shallower ideal of her dream lover to rescue her bloodless heart.

An act of womanly courage: Scene three

Swooning in the violet tinted night air like a maroon falcon turning skilfully over the crushing, driving waves of the ocean, she seeks companionship to befit a lack of identity and streamlined tedium. An isolated heart that looks to be filled with peace and a man’s caressing kiss takes in saccharine drizzled art forms to lend a helping hand from self-annihilation. A stinging imagination with a decorum of palatial mosaic, wound in purple tapestries like royalty. There’s a constant longing for recreations of past ebullient memories and fantastical fantasies dissolved in a subaqueous hedge of unforeseen delight. Flaubert’s effulgent embezzled Emily and Nabokov’s dolorous Lolita provide a glass ceiling to Shakespeare’s sap of incomputable description that wraps its stealthy fingers and feet around love’s furtive trap. The hedonistic pursuit Miss Maya embarks upon tries to reverse the pain from pleasure that has been learned through idle distractions and mischievous Machiavellian teasing, ending in failed relationships and tearful regrets. The shame adds up impermeably and spins her serpent-hooded face in a destruction of spiralling idolatry for a new situation to arise to cover her scars. Primrose walks to comfort herself in daisies that contain elderflower’s sweet resin and mangoes of immutable heaven.

An act of womanly courage: Scene two

Time to leave. She opens the portal to the outside world with ordered precision as she twists the white unblemished knob of the door that houses her. A merry maudlin adventure awaits her. Bound by hopes and fears, Primrose wistfully distracts herself by pensively rebounding her vivacious eyes onto onlookers that seem familiar, although the skin underneath leaves her bemused as to what they are seeking within her. Her codified approach to observe etiquette obscures her state of nature, with her shaped eyebrows, waxed hair, rosewood scent and beige sentimental facial decoration. Repetition of vapid excess has adorned her body of material wants that have superseded her need for comfort in her mind. The iridescent platelets of crimson velveteen encounters for a lasting sexual experience and perennial undying love have divested her a lifetime of motley arrangements that keep her thinking in bed until dawn calls her weary eyes to shut for a timely break. An outing to buy quartz coloured dresses and perishable sandaled shoes is deeply pontificated over to match her scheme of allegorically symbolising her inner heart’s attention to detail. A glowing radiance eschews her anxiety-ridden glance at a passer by as she tempts fate with her light, melodious steps that retrace a path to a dark disturbing cave.

An act of womanly courage: Scene one

Enter.

Doze off perturbed in the confines of a still red room, the clouds thicken over the insecure ruminating woman filled to the brim with margarine and sandalwood, masking her troubles in an ideal world that she can control and keep watch over others. Her name is Primrose Maya, a delicate flower that has blossomed, wilted and feels ready for decay. The tender hips supports her curved, perky breasts with fine, dandy legs that stretch in adoration of any passing man. Petal skinned bronze covers her tremulous hands that touch astir when placed in unison like a double helix strand. She glides as a pelican dances over the abridged azure sky with ethereal finesse that sparkles incandescently. Rosy cheeks promulgate a fiery passion dripping in linen oil that has sundered with ripe facility over her many torturous years of existence. A radish of pink delight stains her trembling lips that await a longing kiss to ignite her proliferation of luminous desires. A wonder woman, tranquil yet plaintive, embalming in the serene effervescence of her poisonous charm. She reads playfully while casting her eyes at the lone light bulb in the room, transporting her offshore to a paradise that she never wants to return from.