My winsome dove, we must go to the opera.  There we shall climb the sweeping steps to the stage above the stage, the stage which is a narrow and precarious stage, where we shall overlook the stage, and laugh and cry to the singers below us.  There we shall be in a throng of bright silks and bright smiles, and you shall see a man you fear and a man you admire and you shall also see for a moment the face of the man you fear and admire and love.  You will run after him, my sweet, and you will lose him in the thrilling milling throng.   You will think you see him, but no, he is lost behind the four women in the tatterdemalion gowns of gold edged with lilac, and netted over with diamonds, the four women who cover their faces with feathered obsidian masks.    Oh, no, my pet, you shall not fear them.  What can you fear from them? They will speak you fair and gently, and speak of their lives, and they shall not hold against you your pitiable soul.  It is not for them to mind that you are clad in the moth-eaten velvet gowns of glamour that never was, adorned with the glittering desperation of your impossible wishes.  Dear heart, you are the one who wrapped over your emptiness with smiling fantasies.   Those with cloth of gold and souls of love never asked such a thing of you.  You need not cry, but you will.  You will flee into the place between the stage above the stage and the windows to the sky, and there is a nothingness there, but there is a dark stair from nowhere to neverwhere that you may use to flee the light and the sound and the joy.  There for a moment,  little one, you shall see the man you fear and admire and love.  He shall turn and see you and all the sadness in your eyes; then he will turn and climb the stair away from your sight.   That, carissima, is whn your heart shall shatter into a thousand thousand crystal pieces.

What shall you feel then, in your rotting gown with your heart scattered on the stair?  A rage, my poppet, a helpless, empty rage with a crushing lassitude; there is nothing that you can do yet something there is that must be done.  Consider, then, whether to cry through the darkness.  Someone will hear, and someone will help.  Consider also, whether to draw a small black knife across your milk-white skin and leave your stinking blood smeared across the place that is neither here nor there.    You cannot possibly do both, my butterfly.   You must choose.  Or will you sit there?  And sit there and sit there and sit there until the man without a face comes to lead you back to the stage above the stage.   There you will look down to see the gypsy girls in their mantillas of sin and stardust, begging Carmen to live and not to leave.

Carmen always leaves.  The lights will go out as the scene changes so that she may meet her love and die.  Alas, my cherry blossom, her love is not there, he is in the dressing room, for he is an Important Singer, and he is scattering his folios of music across the floor and swearing at the ballet girls.   The darkness will go on and on, and they shall all leave, all the thrilling, milling throng, the man you fear, the man you admire, the four women in the gowns of tatterdemalion gold edged with lilac, and even the man without a face.  You will be left alone, waiting above the impatient rustling orchestra.  You will wait there, and wait there and wait there. 

Carmen will never return to the stage.

You must wait there forever, my darling turtledove.