I am Erik

Yesterday I read The Phantom of the Opera. In honor of our play, I read all 327 pages of the real book. I cried. Funny, it's only the 2nd book I've ever cried in and it is the 2nd time I read this book, the 1st of which I did not cry. Erik, the Phantom, reminded myself of me. It's hard to explain. He was the lover of trapdoors, a genius who murdered for fun, the ugly man with the beautiful voice. He was made of death, and so people shunned him. Christine would have come back if she hadn't ripped off his mask. He lived under the Paris Opera House because if he lived in public people would kill him. But all he ever wanted was to be normal. He wanted love. He wanted friends. But he was a corpse. A brilliant corpse, but still a corpse. A twisted sick man on the brink of insanity because all he ever wanted was love and no one would give it to him. If Christine hadn't turned the scorpion, he would have turned the grasshopper. Grasshoppers jump very high. And that would mean great peril for many members of the human race. Erik didn't see himself as human. All he ever wanted was for someone to love him. He had never been kissed. Even his mother had never let him kiss her, she gave him his first mask so no one would ever see the hideousness that hid itself as the Phantom of the Opera.