Momentos and Common Ground

My inability to unpack the first week back was almost a comfort, an immature way to pretend that if I was still living out of my luggage - it didn't have to be over just yet. Now posters, souvenirs, gifts, and stickers are scattered almost everywhere and I'm still opening the different compartments of my luggage where I put all the souvenirs from the shows. Silver confetti from Richard, wood chips from Common Ground, all the little books we attacked the gift tables for.
For some reason the wood chips were more important than anything to me, and are now hot-glued into my book. I loved how a pile of mulch was left on stage and even when other props where taken off, they remained. I saw them as the messy vitality that we were all craving but still I can't come to think of their deeper meaning. Yael's creative vision had a different lasting impression on me, maybe it was due to having actually met her and the cast, maybe it was complete disregard for the clean up and fire safety.
The beginning to Common Ground was exactly what I needed. Riveting movement, shouting, random props brought on stage and then quickly thrown off, it forced me to pay attention. What I loved most is the involvement of history, when focus is brought to one of the most foreign topics in my life, a topic I didn't even know existed, already I am hooked.
How is it that I knew Michael Jackson was accused of molesting a little boy in 1993 but never heard of the genocide occurring within an entire country, never mind finding out that members of the cast had been affected so directly.
This guilt was embodied by the character Alek, a Serbian man whose family was bombed while he studied, worried about haircuts, and lived a normal life. His monologue made the audience stop and think- is what I am doing this very moment even important? Is what I am worrying about something that disastrous in comparison to the worry of maybe not eating or having clean water to drink? Am I going to die from a higher power because they decided to hate my country? It's a cleansing of your morals that only happens every so often, and thank God because it can really make a person feel shitty. We need this reality-check, this reminder as to how great we have it, because someone else doesn't. 

Coming back home to my life wasn't as bad as it could be but when you're descending from a newly discovered paradise to be thrown into work, rising gas prices, and possibly not having a mattress for your apartment, I felt trapped. I wanted to go back. I had a three week taste of the best experience yet, and I wasn't ready for it to be over.

Replaying the scenes of shows that I remember cross my mind multiple times a day, but if I didn't have all of these scraps of paper and wood chips, I'd almost believe it never happened.