Desperately in love with Hamlet

I wrote a love letter to Hamlet, and I hoped it was a little like a group of teenagers performing it at twilight.

​Once upon a time, a kid went to see Hamlet performed by a group of teenagers at twilight. They understood just enough of it that it seeped comfortably into them and they fell madly and recklessly in love with it. (Later, their mom drove them home in the thick orange dark and they were quiet and smiling.)
It was the dark purple of the play matching the dark purple of my insides. The unsettling magic of twilight set against the settling of meeting words you know you're going to fall in love with.
Hamlet took root in my chest, it planted its ink-dark self in my curious purple heart and I grew up around it. To me, Hamlet isn't so much a thing to play as a thing to live in. Not a play so much as a place. Not words so much as a world. Familiar like a grand wild fairytale made of kings and bones and velvet.
There are stories that live in you and then there are stories to live in and then there are stories to wrap around you like a cloak.
I love it because it's such an enormous emotional thing. Such an expansive thing. There is a place in it for almost every story in them.
It feels like a love story, though I'm not sure why. It feels like when you wake up and can't remember what you dreamt except that it left a gaping hole in your lungs. I love it with my throat and my thighs and every finger and it hurts.
It felt like something I needed more than anything to write.
There was this kid who read and watched Hamlet after Hamlet and let it build up inside them until one day the restless expanse of it spilled over their edges.
I took this story that felt like a home, I took those words that settled me into myself, I took that negative space between characters that hurt me like a dream, and I built something a little bit beautiful.
(I wrote my story at night because words and ghosts are sharper after dark.)
I tried to find words that felt like the way your wrists ache in the cold. How it is to miss these characters you've never met and never will. The desperate tumbling gasping way it felt to fall for a four hundred-year-old story.
There is your Hamlet and then there is my Hamlet and maybe if we're lucky our lenses will overlap.
I wrote a love letter to Hamlet, and I hoped it was a little like a group of teenagers performing it at twilight.

- Lark Abbott