The theatre was effervescent with the energy of a wonderstruck audience after assisting to a dazzling performance. As always, it was almost otherworldly, phantasmagoric, and yet not so much because of the play itself as the person interpreting it. 

Vivienne Quinn met her own eyes in the makeup mirror. Lined with sharp-angled kohl, her face covered in a myriad of powders. Her cutting cheekbones were outlined in gold sparkles and her lashes had enough mascara to cover a blank canvas. When she brought her hands up to untie her elaborate bun, her champagne hair cascaded like a rippling curtain on her shoulders, all the way down to her waist.  

Performances drained her. Backstage was a haven, a place to recuperate before stepping on stage for the next act. She reached her hand for her makeup-removing solution, nearly knocking over her stack of letters in the process. Letters. Cards. Bouquets of blowers. Crazed fans, adoring individuals, clandestine lovers. Pools of them every week, never answered. Never read.

Stripped of makeup, the actress’s face was perhaps even more astounding. Reporters called her an angel on earth, so saturated in beauty that she was more blinding than the sun. Magazines portrayed her on every front page, each photo more bedazzling, each pose more extravagant than the last. Companies wanted her donning their jewellery, their perfume, their silks. Vivienne would, but her most ostentatious accessory, by far, regardless of the garments she wore, were her eyes. Two smoking jewels spat from a violet inferno. And that’s all anyone ever saw, for while she had porcelain skin and bountiful hair, her eyes would latch on anyone who met them with such intensity that perhaps their dreams would never know anything else. Perhaps the Earth had never seen a creature so stunning, so broken. Broken? Addicted? Dead? They’re all the same anyway. They all stop you from living. 

Vivienne reached her hand into a deep pocket of her satin robes and fished out a small transparent vial, full to the top with green pills. She scooped up all the tranquilisers and shoved them into her mouth. It was like heaven, while she tasted them, even if it felt like hell afterwards. 

She was beautiful, Vivienne. Beautiful and broken, her two sides separated by merely a theatre curtain, a glass vial or a broken smile. How easy it was to be fooled. How easy it was to wish for her life, her fame, her beauty. How easy it was to not even fathom the possibility of struggle and pain. Yet how hard it was to pretend, day after day, that she was perfectly whole and sane.

 Sane. Insane. Almost identical words. Separated by only a thin line. How easy  it was to fall into the chasm between them and climb out on the wrong side.