Lest I Forget
This is a semi-autobiographical creative writing piece I wrote a while back.
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I felt the weight of expectation pressing down on me, the benchmark set by all the skits in past years, the knowledge the all eyes were on me. This was my one chance to show everyone what I was made of. All that preparation, the hours of stress and emotion, vanished as soon as the spotlight hit my eyes. This was it. Everything boiled down to this moment. I had to nail it.
And then I choked. I don’t know what it was. I just blanked. The lines, the expressions, the dance moves, everything had just disappeared. It should have been so easy: just remember the first line and everything will come flooding back. But it didn’t. As I stood there, I felt everyone’s eyes on me, the spotlight glaring, the steady hum of the microphone in my hand. “Just do it, Tom! Just open your mouth and say the line. The line! What’s the goddam line!?” A million thoughts were racing through my brain, everything except the line. The paralysis was so strong that instead of thinking about the line, trying for the life of me to remember it, all I could think about was the fact that I couldn’t remember it. Fuck.
I had to do something so I stepped a few paces forward, put my cheesiest smile on my face and raised my eyebrow expectantly. “Are they buying it?” I scanned quickly over a few faces in the audience. One, two, maybe three looked convinced. But not the young guy with glasses in the front row. And not the woman sitting next to him with the handbag in her lap. Shit, definitely not the old man sitting a few rows back. And Mum was in the audience tonight too! “Mum! No! Fuck! Not Mum too! Come on, Tom. What’s the line!?” Another few steps to the side, a different smile, the microphone brought up to my mouth. But still nothing. Zilch. Nada. I could feel my face burn, hotter and redder than the Ferrari red it must have been before.
I looked up at the audience again, this time making eye contact with a young girl a few rows from the front. I stared blankly at her for what seemed like an age. “This isn’t ok. It isn’t even remotely ok. It probably couldn’t be further from ok.” The girl leaned over to the guy next to her and whispered something in his ear. He looked at me, then back at her, nodded and smiled. My heart sank even lower than it was before. But then it happened. I opened my mouth, as if to defend myself weakly, and out it came. The line. The stupid fucking line that seemed so obvious now that I had said it:
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”
