Love's Curtain Call

I wasn't quite sure what came over me over the next year and a half. I never really did snap out of the state of mind that Ville had left me in, and yet I somehow managed to focus on my acting for once. As much as I thought I'd leave the university and move back in with my parents, I felt as if I just didn't want to do it. I knew I'd only end up wasting my life there, just as I had done before I came to the university. But I knew there were other reasons for staying.

It helped me cope with the pain. The university had almost become my sanctuary. It was all I had left of him - it reminded me of him. Sometimes I could even pretend that he'd never left; that I would be able to find him somewhere in the theatre. I knew it wasn't true, but I was obsessed with pretending it was.

Time seemed to pass by as quickly as water would in a river. I felt as if I was a slave to it. But I didn't complain. In fact, the only thing I seemed to do was act. It was the only thing left to do, really. I think a part of me wanted to make Ville proud. Even if he stopped loving me, hopefully one day I'd make him proud to say that I had been his student once.

As for Lisa - I never saw her again. She left the university immediately for another one. As far as I knew she was no longer in New York. I didn't really care, though. I didn't really feel anything for her.

And so time went on, with little actually happening. My 21st birthday came and went. I went to visit my parents for the occasion, which I did very rarely. They always asked questions. My mother in particular. Questions which I didn't want to answer. 'Why haven't you brought your boyfriend to come and visit us?' Or, even worse, 'Why didn't you tell us you're still single?'

By the time my 22nd birthday came around, I didn't even bother visiting them. Seeing the pattern of the year repeat itself was surprisingly worse the second time round. But at least I had something to look forward to - the end of my course was approaching very quickly. Because of the strange amount of effort I was putting into my acting, I had high hopes for my results. I had even become the best student in my class. Well, me and one other girl. Since we were both outcasts of the others in the class, that gave us something in common. We became casual friends - 'casual' meaning, we didn't spend every minute of the day together, but we looked out for each other and ate lunch together. It seemed to be enough to get us both through life at the university.

I was grateful for her friendship, since everyone in my year knew about me and Ville (things like that just couldn't be kept secret). But it didn't bother her, like it did with everyone else. I even began to wonder if she'd been through a similar sort of situation. But I knew it wasn't likely.

Eventually, the end of the year did arrive. There isn't much else to tell, except that I completed the course and left the university proudly holding a degree in acting. I didn't want to leave, though. I needed the university to remind me of Ville. I knew that without it I would have no connection to him. But I had to leave.

I stayed in New York, though. In fact, the future seemed to be bright for me there. I received a call only a few weeks after my graduation from The New York Theatre. They'd heard that I was looking for work in theatrics, and were currently rounding up people about my age for the next play that was in the works. They had been impressed to find out that I'd left the university with the highest results from my year.

The rest of the story is about what happened during the months which followed that phone call. . .