To All my Unfinished Projects: a Love Letter

I miss you.

Not enough to visit, though. For me, distance is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, and enkindles the great.

Please understand why I’ve chosen to stay away all this time… the attraction is too strong. Were we to pick back up where we left off… well… I don’t know if I could put you down again. And I simply cannot balance that with everything else I’ve committed to, at this point. I’m a different person now.

Despite all that, despite everything standing in our way, I can’t help but think about you. I toss and turn in the dark, thoughts of you keeping me awake long after midnight. I keep thinking, “what if?” What could we have made together, if I’d stayed? What could have been different?

I remember our immediate spark, right from the beginning. You fell into my life like fate waving hello, and it all felt so natural, easy. You bent to my fingertips like you had no other wish than to obey my desire. I remember a feverish frenzy, as if each moment wasn’t enough, as if any choice we could make wouldn’t be enough to release our potential. I remember a sleepless hyperfocus, an intensity I couldn’t describe, a flow of energy unlike anything else in the world.

Ultimately it was our potential, our inability to choose one path or the other, that failed us. Passion cannot replace compatibility, and I suppose we always knew we were mismatched. Maybe it was timing… or interests… or maybe it was because I was already promised to another.

Still, you haunt my dreams. I can’t forget the hours I spent with you, cultivating our connection, persuading myself it would work out. After all that has happened, I can’t regret that precious time; I learned so much about you, about myself.

I’m not sure why I chose to write to you today. Perhaps I like to think that you’re still there for me. Perhaps I want your forgiveness for leaving you behind. I won’t apologize for doing what I needed, but I still wish we had more time… time to finish everything we started.

To my Unfinished Projects:
unwritten play drafts,
half-baked businesses,
10-page novels,
one-poem poetry collections,
abandoned fibercrafts,
half-full notebooks and sketchbooks,
dropped classes,
unused craft supplies,
sparse Pinterest collections,
unbuilt websites,
empty social media profiles,
unbudgeted travel plans,
and every lost idea I’ve ever sacrificed to the golden idol named “I don’t need to write it down, I’ll remember,“

I love you still.

Dress Rehearsal Attendee

Today, I get to sit in on a dress rehearsal for the first time in over 18 months.

I’m thrilled, of course, to see live performance; I’m even more thrilled, arguably, to see bustling technicians finishing up the final details of a changeover and hear a grating drill securing loose screws. Eavesdropping on the preparations is almost like a tacit invitation to pretend I also belong in this space today. Almost.

I’m sitting in the balcony, front row center. I am alone in the section, and I’ve chosen one of the best seats in the house. The minutes tick by as I wait, through flickered lights and muttered checklists, for the show to begin. It’s a working rehearsal, so of course it won’t be perfect–but that’s exactly why I came to see this one, to compare the changes I’ll notice when opening night comes in a few days. The process is more magical–to my biased view–than the end result alone.

Sitting here, I find I can’t quite muster appropriate excitement for the performance… instead, I can only think about how dearly I want to be more than just a spectator.

I think about sitting in the house to observe shows I’ve designed, shows I’ve understudied—hours and hours of observing, marking scripts, laughing to give the actors just a hint of audible encouragement. Then, afterwards, popping backstage for notes, or to gather some props for tweaking. How I’d love just to do that.

Then I think, oh, but to be backstage, that would be enough. Wearing black clothes, strapped with tie line and gaff tape and hairpins, invisible except when backlit by electric blue lights… it would be a step toward enough, it would be way more enough than sitting here, an outsider.

Clarity hits: no, I don’t want to be backstage… I want to be backstage, and then onstage, traversing the carefully crafted barriers between real and myth, living two lives and two stories simultaneously, emerging from a glow-taped labyrinth into the blinding stage lights only to whirl around and exit through a forest of curtains and drops once more. I want to be that chameleonite whose hide changes based on her surroundings: one character in the spotlight, and another in the blackout. I want to be an agent of transition, hopping the stepping stones of a story, reaching out my hand for an audience to grasp, calling “come with me!”

Today, however, all I can do is sit, and watch, and try to enjoy the show. It’s more enough than not being here at all. It’s a step toward enough.

And I’ll be sure to applaud, loudly.

Hmm, says she: a Sonnet

Hmm, says she, I’ve been doing some thinking
About the water we have been drinking.
More common than dirt, more precious than gold,
Each and every drop a million years old.
How is it then that we are running out,
Getting scarce in every spigot and spout?
The rain still comes and the rivers still run,
But still it’s not enough… for everyone.
Some people still bathe, and steam, and shower–
Of course, they’re the ones with all the power.
Others go parched, chronic dehydration;
Ah, such “equality” in our nation.
I can’t help but feel we’ve gone all awry,
All because of an oily, greedy lie.

The Franifesto: A Phoenix

Long ago, I had a personal blog of the same name, albeit with “.wordpress.com” attached to the url instead of the sleek, sexy “.com.” Luckily, my funding has improved somewhat in the decade since I last wrote under this title.

I don’t have any remaining materials from that blog. In the time since, I have created several new websites of varying kinds; some were for marketing purposes, some for selling my art, some for flopped projects, and some for secret ruminations now long deleted.

All I remember from that original blog, The Franifesto number 0–like the tarot’s Fool–is that I felt totally free to publish my thoughts, poems, doodles, essays, quips. It was a space all my own, uncurated by algorithms, unrestrained by the trappings of form and function required to “post” anywhere else. It was mine alone to build, destroy, and rebuild as I saw fit. At 4:15 this morning (during yet another night of poor sleep), I realized that I dearly miss it.

Or, missed it. A tandem realization: the revival, like the deletion, was entirely in my hands.

A quick internet search told me that no one else had yet claimed this specific moniker; the only hit to my search was my own ancient Tumblr relic of the same name, lately conquered by unbelievably cheap advertisements for RayBans. The name wasn’t taken on Twitter, so I snapped it up there first. The dopamine whoosh from claiming one corner of the internet led to another, and now I’m the established purveyor of several @TheFranifesto profiles, culminating in this, the blog–this, the first post, tapping out on my little phone screen at 4:57 AM, even before I’ve started to design the actual site.

You see, lately I’ve felt a sort of expressive frustration. I’m sure it’s borne of a heady brew of factors… a viral hiatus on my performing work, extreme eco-anxiety, disquieting behaviors encouraged by social media, a year-plus of isolation… to name only a few. I’ve had so much to say and nowhere that served me to say it. I’m a wordy person… Instagram stories just weren’t doing it for me anymore. Time & character limits are just that: limits.

I had been thinking of doing a theatre blog attached to my actor site. I had been thinking of doing an art process blog attached to my artist site. But in late-stage capitalism, I’ve come to reflect that my career selections cannot make up all of who I am, and I cannot therefore be satisfied only expressing myself within a professional context. It felt like all of my life was a professional illusion… and as a professional illusionist, a pretender and creator, that’s actually swell. But, who am I when I am not making magic? Does she get to be seen, too? It got to the point where I couldn’t even bring myself to share photos of my home life because it all felt like fraud–a mithril veil I’d woven between myself and everyone else, light and shiny and practically unbreakable. I craved vulnerability and authenticity, but saw only chrome-plated avenues toward a sterile vision of my life, mountanous moments polished down to picturesque pebbles.

So… what to do?

Create a platform, of course. The idea struck and stuck and, fuck it, I’m doing it. Just an hour after conception, the idea is born.

I don’t know what will come of this. I can’t plan ahead much, because my whole desire is authentic expression, which requires a certain spontaneity. I do fully expect, however: poetry, essays, lists, diagrams, doodles, experiences, musings, puns, jokes, pitches, stories.

Overwhelmingly, stories.

In gratitude and hope,

Franny