The first time I stepped onto a stage of my own accord, I felt dwarfed.

The lights overhead were blinding, the empty space around me so huge I almost wanted to spread my arms out just to prove to myself that there was no one there behind me waiting to pounce. I chose to do this?

When the song I’d practiced for so many hours earlier that day started to play, my voice was shallow, the music seemingly miles away, and the words I thought I knew by heart barely came forward in time. Needless to say, that audition didn’t go well.

But somehow, despite the stage fright and the equally terrible dance call later on, the only thought going through my mind as I left the theater was “holy shit, I want to do that again.”

So I did, and I still do, and I keep moving toward the day I can take the stage for a crowd with a spark in my step and confidence in my smile.

My voice still weakens a little when I go up now, and the anxiety when the lights hide the room hasn’t gone away.

But I don’t shrink under the pressure.

I don’t forget the words, and the music follows with me.

Now when I step onto the stage, I almost feel a little bigger.

I can’t feel my hands.

It’s the only thought she can get out, the only thing she can process, the simplest set of words she can string together in the moment. The world is suddenly dark, so dark, and she could swear that just a moment ago there had been more than this, the crushing weight of invisibility pressing her down.

I can’t feel my feet either.

She kicks and struggles and her toes meet hard wood—couldn’t this sort of thing break a bone or twelve with ease? She wouldn’t know. All she knows is that she has to go up, past the wood and the weight and the awful dreadful suspicion that there is nothing else for her broken spirit to feel.

What can I feel?

Any other day, it would be a simple question with a simple answer. But she can’t feel, she can’t see, she can’t know what this is or how deep she is. She scratches, fights, claws her way forward, pulls a deep breath into depleted lungs and forces a response to her own question.

Nothing.

She looks down at her own body, her hands just as unfeeling and lungs just as empty as before. There is no longer the weight of burial dirt and splintering coffin wood to battle, no fear of invisibility or numbness to push her forward.

What am I?

Is she…free? Untethered? Set loose? She doesn’t know. She stands, stares down at the grave before her. The heart she had in life would be beating out of her chest now had it followed her into death. But now she only sighs, a single shallow breath to welcome herself to the afterlife.

A ghost has no use for feelings here.

He’d gone to bed at 10:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, the sun well on its way to the other side of the Earth. He’d hoped it would give him an extra hour of sleep, maybe two, before his mind simply couldn’t take it anymore.

But at exactly 1:01 AM, even against his best efforts, his eyes popped open. Right on time.

He got up with a sigh and went to his piano, where the Moon shone brightly onto the keys through the window. “Hey, old friend,” he whispered. A, B, C, D, E, then back again. “Top of the morning.”

I’m glad you’re doing well.

“Well?” He almost laughed. “Sure. Well.”

It was his (their?) standard routine—each morning at 1:01 AM, when Harlan Fletcher’s brain decided sleep was just too much trouble, he’d come back to his keyboard, play the same songs he’d been playing for three years now, and have a conversation with the Moon. A, C#, E. “How is it up there?”

Well, he called it a conversation. D, F, A.

Don’t you wish I could tell you?

If he were honest with you, he’d tell you he was just…tired. Tired of being alone and unsteady and ridden with fear, and the Moon gave him a bit of constance, normalcy, companionship. C, E, G.

If he were honest with himself…well, we wouldn’t have much of a story then, would we?

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Each morning at 1:01 AM, a man speaks to the moon, and each morning, the moon speaks back. Sing of the Moon is a stage play first written in prose, a method designed to flesh out each character and each scene before its translation to the stage.