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we’ll soon find out.

do not confuse your first act with your second. how it’s been is not how it’s meant to end. this moment is a threshold. the cell door is about to open and the curtain has just come down for intermission. everyone in the audience is asking the same question they’re whispering backstage: is this the lifetime that our protagonist sets herself free? her biggest battle has been the same for all lifetimes. but tickets were so expensive because this could be the one where it actually happens.

we meet her in the cellblock. we meet her in all the ways she has ever been trapped; in the bed where she’s always lain, with the song of her soul and a blue sky dream of freedom just on the other side of a high window, among the guards and cellmates that have become friends, serving under the fearsome voice of a faceless warden.

act one poses the question that must be answered in act two: “here’s what she’s always known. is this what she wants?” we aren’t sure how she’s done it, but it becomes obvious that act one is an obstacle course that the protagonist herself has set into motion. though we hear very few details of her crimes, we witness her punishment as it unfolds. act two will show us one of two scenes, and we will soon understand the nature of free will: does it exist? and if it does, how free is it?

when the chimes ring for the audience to find their seats, we will see whether she bounds out of her cell with the fury and joy of a thousand lifetimes or whether prison of mind is the tragedy of humanity. if every day, our only job is to show up as the version of ourselves that wants to be free, we can trust ourselves to do the right thing when the prison gate opens. they’ll not find us hanging back in our cell, having finally learned that we were always free, old comforts be damned.