Allow me, if I may, a bit of an explanation, before I give you an explanation.
Quite a few years ago, eight years to be exact, when Zack and I were still dating, we were lying on his couch listening to some piano and vocal tracks I had recently recorded.
"You know what you should do?" Zack queried, talking into my hair. "You should write a book with a song for each chapter."
The idea intrigued me. What would I write about? The more I thought about it, the more it thought about me, if that makes any sense at all.
Alternatively, with the joy of my marriage to Zack in July 2008, and then the birth of Hawke in May of 2009, my life, for the first time in a long time, was truly settled and secure. That is when the ghost of my mother began to haunt me.
By haunt I mean she began to invade my thoughts more than ever before. I was rapidly approaching the age when she passed away; I now had four children -- roughly the same ages my siblings and I were when she died -- and I wanted more than ever before just to be able to talk to this person I never really got a chance to know. Woman to woman. Oh, my heart still aches for this. I began a process of reaching out to every person I knew who knew her, to try and get an idea of who she was when she wasn't being "Mom" and their recollections around the time of her death. A fascinating trend began to emerge: some key points of her personality were consistent, but a lot of people remembered her and her life, and how it ended, very differently. Which was the truth?
Then, in my dreams, I would see myself walking out onto a stage; I could see the set up perfectly. Every time I would walk down center, to the front of the stage and begin speaking to an audience.
I began to realize that this reoccurring dream, along with Zack's song for each chapter idea, and the longing to know my mother we're all coming together into one thing. It terrified me, which, as I am beginning to learn, is exactly why I knew I must do it.
So what is The Vitreous Humor? Literally it is the jelly like substance that makes up one's eyeball. It is also the title of my one woman play. Well, a play with music, too. It's a play about childhood and the blind spot children have for their parents; it's a play about how no one sees anything the same and memories aren't to be trusted, even though they're all we have; it's a play about my family; it's a play for my mother.