It is fall of our senior year of college when we are cast opposite each other in a play about betrayal. It is your first time on stage, but it does not show. If anything, your newness is magnetic. You are cast as Gino, a dejected Hollywood dreamer with thick glasses and an even thicker head. I am Marla, a seductive con artist. Each night before the house opens you take great care blindfolding and gagging me backstage, then tying my wrists behind my back and rolling me up in an Oriental rug. It is unclear why I begin the play this way, but as actors we do not ask questions, we do as we are told. When the house lights dim, you and our castmate, Kenny, hoist the rug over your shoulders, carry me on stage, and lay me down on a saggy couch in your character’s shabby West Hollywood apartment. I listen as Kenny, my co-conspirator, lays the trap for you. He explains that a couple of broads gave him twelve hundred dollars to watch their rug until morning.

When I feel your hand on the rug, I take my cue. I begin to rock back and forth, until I gain enough momentum to propel myself off the couch and onto the floor. I roll to the lip of the stage where I hit my mark and sit up. You remove my gag and I wriggle my wrists free, and then we’re off. The script becomes a suggestion, an outline, and we fill in the scenes with play. Each night we find new moments—me fainting, you tripping over furniture—steering our ship toward the inevitable climax when your character finally wakes up to my deception and you tie my wrists to a wooden chair and slit my throat with a dulled blade from the props department. Sometimes you are so committed to the moment that you press the knife hard against the bony part of my throat, harder than necessary, since the fake blood is not triggered from the knife, but from a bag sewn inside my white silk dress.

Afterward in the dressing room I wash the red corn syrup from my costume. Beneath the fluorescent lights I catch my neck in the mirror. A string of red beads emerges like a necklace. I press my fingers to the red line where you pressed the knife. It is a testament of your commitment to your craft. I think, the mark of an artist.

Each night after the show we pile into your roommate’s van and drive to Kenny’s. Kenny is still living at his parents’ house, but it’s okay because he’s six foot four and gorgeous and should probably just drop out of school and move to LA while he still has his six-pack. Kenny doesn’t understand why I’m not dating him. He is everything women want, everything I should want, but I want a visionary. You are crazy in the best way, cigarettes in your back pocket and light autumn jackets that smell of sweat because you have better things to do than laundry. You are all length and angles, except for your face, baby cheeks and a round chin that practically disappear your blue eyes whenever you smile.

No one knows if you are gay or bi or straight, but I know that the night I kissed you in the front seat of your roommate’s van, you kissed me back. I know that when Kenny and I rehearse our make out scene, you always disappear. And each night in Kenny’s living room when he plugs his iPod into the speaker, there’s that look you give me before the beat drops—the slight arch of your eyebrow, a dare meant just for me—before the music makes waves of our bodies and we give ourselves over to the ocean of sound. It’s late when we collapse to the living room carpet and smoke Kenny’s cashed weed. We reminisce about when we were kids, when play pretend lasted for hours, when whole worlds and fully formed characters sprang from our imaginations, then bust-up laughing when Kenny tells us to be quiet because his mom is sleeping in the next room. We are two lanky kids naïve enough to be in the moment, two lanky kids who wear the word artist like a badge, who think the world will open up to them at the snap of a finger.

There is psychological terminology for how I feel about you (probably a support group, too). “Dimorphous Expressions” they are called, an opposite, seemingly inappropriate emotional reaction to a positive or negative situation. Examples: A puppy is so cute you want to smother it; a sunrise is so beautiful you cry; a movie is so terrifying you laugh. These are healthy reactions. They regulate positive to negative impulses, similar to a circuit breaker: an excess of one emotion switches the current.

If only I trusted in the wisdom of my own machinery.

We spend long Saturday afternoons running around the Coralville reservoir looking for fossils and talking about acting. We climb limestone boulders and jump dried streams, all the while slipping in and out of characters and making each other laugh. It is one of the last warm days of fall when we sit on a rock ledge and I lay my head in your lap. I stare down at the 375-million-year-old seafloor, and imagine present-day Iowa as a tropical climate. Coral reefs instead of corn stalks. Sharks instead of cows. I want to tell you what I am thinking, but I don’t. A perfect silence has blossomed between us, and I want to make it last.

It is Friday night and the play has closed. I am alone in my basement apartment watching the first snowfall from my bedroom window. I spend the evening like this, admiring the lower halves of people stumbling through the alley, acclimating to the winter that is yet to come. I record the can-collector’s mutterings as he liberates aluminum from the dumpster, fish-netted sorority girls crying the word “jacket” and catcalls from frat boys dwarfed in their fathers’ sport coats. I write you haikus of their drunken humanity. It is my attempt at intimacy. Here is one:

He: puffs his plumage
She: breasts like summer mangoes
Feathers shed on snow

I don’t mind the solitude unless I know you are out in the world without me. Then your absence is a pin-hole in my balloon, releasing the stale air that was keeping me afloat.

It is unclear if we are officially a couple, but I decide one Friday night that we should celebrate our togetherness at the taco joint on Market Street. I dress for the occasion in a silk polka dot dress and combat boots. I sit at a high top by the window so I can watch for you. Twenty minutes after our reservation, you slope in wearing a beanie and canvas sneakers, even though it’s sleeting. You kiss me on the cheek and I hand you the menu. All day I’ve been dreaming of the spinach and mushroom enchiladas. When the waitress asks for your order, you explain you already ate.

“I thought we were doing dinner,” I say. You remove your beanie and shake your dripping bangs out of your eyes like a wet dog after a bath.

“I don’t have any money right now,” you say, “but I just made homemade crackers—want to come to my place?” The sincerity in your eyes tells me you’re not joking. You reach for my hand across the table. “I even added rosemary,” you say.

Each bite of my enchilada is an embarrassment. The cheese sauce is richer than I remembered and I worry the spinach has lodged in my teeth. I can’t stand you watching me or the fact that you don’t seem to require food. But more than anything I can't stand that I invited you to something as basic as dinner. As long as I’ve known you you’ve maintained yourself on a steady diet of cigarettes and PBR, supplemented by the high you get from acting. I admire your artistic integrity, your close to the bone poverty. I want to believe I could starve myself for something, but each queso-drenched bite proves otherwise.

I’ve been meditating on the idea of the artist. I make origami of the word, folding it up and down, twisting it inside out to get a good look, wrapping it around myself like a shawl to see if it fits. What I am talking about is the very beginning. When all is clay, when all is dark mud and fertile, when the lights are not yet on, and I am alone, only clay, only hands, only motion. I think back to the time when creation was my native language, building a city out of cereal boxes, directing a fleet of ships from the top bunk of my lofted bed, choreographing an ocean dance to Pachabel’s Canon in D. I removed the mattress from the lower part of my lofted bed and hung a curtain around the bottom frame to create a space that belonged to me. I filled it with objects. Journals, gel pens, lipstick samples, nail polish, magazines, sketch books, tea candles, scarves, a mirror. When the hallway light went out, I’d pull the curtains tight around my secret cave and light the tea candles, braid my hair in butterfly clips, write love poems to imaginary sailors, paint my toes electric blue. You’re going to light the house on fire! my mother would inevitably yell when she smelled the candles burning. I could have stayed there forever. Cocooned in curtains, the blue flame dancing in my hungry eyes. I was in communion with something unspoken. I did not need to name it because I was it.

I don’t know how you’ve done it. You’ve held on to your beautiful chaos. You have carried it with you like a golden egg, fragile and spectacular. You have swallowed it whole so that it is you. Your hair, your eyelashes, hands, fingers, your every gesture throws off pools of light, blinding all who reach for you.

Before meeting you to go to a bar downtown I empty my closet and lay my shirts across my bed: old band t-shirts, sweaters, v-necks, tanks. I try on different combinations. This shirt with those leggings. This tank with those jeans. But everything is too young or too old or too frumpy or too clean. I stand in front of my full-length mirror, the heat rising in my cheeks. You’re being irrational, I tell myself. It’s just clothes, I think.

It is Halloween and you let me pick the costumes. You will be the Titanic, I will be the Iceberg. I buy a white shoulder-padded jumpsuit, pin my hair as high as it will go, and draw blue icicles over my eyes. I arrive to the party alone since you won’t pick up your phone. Without my Titanic, I am mistaken for David Bowie. My Bowie knowledge is embarrassing at best, and every time a bro walks up and says, “dude, Life on Mars?” I float to another corner of the kitchen hoping that you have charged your phone, that you have not lost the address.

When you finally do arrive, I see what took you so long. You are dressed all in black, a beautiful cardboard replica of the Titanic hung with floss around your neck. You’ve fashioned the ship’s golden funnels out of toilet paper tubes and taken great care to poke holes for windows along each massive side, so it comes as a surprise when, within two minutes of your arrival, you crash into me with such force that your cardboard creation folds in on itself. But you do not go down easily. You improvise a one-man show, ripping your creation to pieces in the middle of the living room. Ghouls and Power Rangers gather around with red solo cups of warm beer and fistfuls of tortilla chips to watch you flail and tear yourself apart.

I stand in the back of the room, next to a freshman Ninja Turtle who tells me through green lips that I have a sick Bowie costume. I go in search of beer. For the rest of the party you sulk around in black tights with the remaining piece of bent cardboard slung around your neck like a bad omen. I ask if you want to come back to my place. You say you’d like to see where the night goes. You tell me not to wait up.

I don’t know where your mind goes when we’re fucking. I can never see your eyes through your blonde bangs, and I wonder if you’re thinking of someone else, or maybe something else: a part you will play, a script you will write, a monologue you will memorize. I admire your singularity, how one passion could point you so completely. How even when we are physically fused, you are capable of evaporation. I want to peel back your eyelids, cut off your hair: Look at me! I will scream, Look at me!

It is after Thanksgiving when we sit on my twin bed and I tell you I’m unhappy. I don’t know if we are breaking up since it is unclear if we were ever together, but you ask the question I can’t bring myself to form. “Can we still make things together?”

“Of course,” I say.
“Cool,” you say.
“Cool,” I say back, unsure what has really been agreed upon.

For my thesis project I direct a play, María Irene Fornés’ Mud. It is a story about Mae, a woman uprooting herself from the men in her life. I cast you as Lloyd, the pig-fucker. Your relationship to Mae is not articulated. You are not lovers. You are not siblings. You are like animal-mates, fluid in your expression and vulgar in your taking. I dress you in a white onesie with leather boots, something fit for a man-baby. The play is a perfect playground for your impulses and I watch you follow all of them. Striking athletic poses, grabbing your crotch, slapping Mae’s book off the table, swinging an axe above your head, cartwheeling across the stage.

At night I dream that I am Mae and you are Lloyd, that we do not need words because our bodies are language enough.

It is our final dress rehearsal before opening night. In the scene where Mae invites your rival into her bed you become enraged, stomping around the stage, whirling your body, lifting the actress’ skirt, creating new moments that we did not choreograph.

I stop you. “You have to stick to the blocking we agreed to.”

“But I don’t feel it,” you say through clenched teeth.

“Then find a way to feel it.”

You stretch your arms as wide as they will go in your onesie and bellow, “I can’t do it if I don’t feel it!”

The show opens on a Friday and runs for two weekends. I stand in the back, too nervous to sit. In the final scene of the play, Mae announces her departure. She tells you she is leaving to find a job, a home, someplace “far away from you.” You beg her to stay, but she leaves anyway. You call after her. “Mae! Stop! Mae!”

You grab your rifle and run after her. A shot sounds offstage, and then we hear you sobbing. The audience is stone still when you return with Mae in your arms, the fake blood from inside her dress covering your hands and chest, the red shocking against your white onesie. You lay Mae across the table at center stage, a look of childlike awe on your face. The audience is silent as she lifts her hand toward the fading light and takes her final breath.

When the music swells and the lights cut to black, the audience applauds. It is hard to tell who or what they are applauding—your performance or my direction. Each night during curtain call I retreat to the dressing room instead of appearing on stage. Each night before you go home you bring me the bloodied costumes and I take my time washing them clean.

Tonight, I start with Mae’s dress. As I work the bar of soap against the stain, my thoughts turn to you. I have been trying to name how I feel, and two thoughts come to mind. I am either jealous or cannibalistic. I don’t think I ever loved you—it’s worse than that—all I ever wanted was to consume you. Or perhaps, if I let the small voice speak, the very quiet one that whispers unflattering truths, I would hear it say, “No, I wanted to be you.”

When I finish Mae’s dress, I hang it up to dry and grab your onesie. The bloodstains are everywhere tonight. I turn the costume over in my hands and discover the holes. Beneath the armpits the stitching has frayed, below the crotch, a tear the size of my fist. I picture you leaping around stage, refusing, as always, to be contained. I plug the drain and turn the faucet on as cold as it will go, gently submerging the fragile garment under the freezing water. I wonder what the costume shop will say when I return a tattered rag instead of your onesie. I wonder how much I will have to pay them for your damage.

While your costume soaks, I think back to the last time you didn’t show. It was a cold morning. You didn’t call, and for the first time, I didn’t wait. Instead, I found my art supplies. I pulled them out like old friends: fat markers that smelled of candied fruits, waxy crayons with sharpened tips, oily Cray-Pas with torn paper wrapping. I dumped them out onto my bedroom floor and shut the door. All afternoon I lay on my stomach sketching women’s faces on 5x7 rectangles of colored paper. Quick dashes of charcoal—strong jaws, long teeth, sleek noses, black eyes. When I finished one, I started another. I listened to Fiona Apple, her smooth honey voice, her angry keys, the same songs that filled many girlhood afternoons filling the empty box of my apartment.

Hearing you knock some three hours later, I take my time finishing my drawing. I like thinking of you outside waiting in the cold while I am inside, warmed by my own fire. You knock louder. I lift myself from the carpet and turn off my music. I toss the last drawing atop the others at the foot of my bed. Her charcoal eyes stare back at me, holding my gaze.

I open the front door to find you smoking an American Spirit, your long frame leaning against my rusted-out railing. “Hey,” you say, as if you’re right on time.

“Hey,” I say, as if I’m not angry. You stamp out your cigarette with a torn sneaker and kiss my cheek with that stale nicotine breath. You don’t offer an explanation, just squeeze past me, taking the stairs three at a time down to my basement apartment, into my bedroom, where you flop onto my twin bed, shoes and all. You peer over the foot of my bed and notice the drawing I have just finished. You pick it up and hold it to the light.

“This looks like you.” You find the others and spread them out across the carpet. “This one has your eyebrows. This one has your cheekbones. Your teeth. Your chin. Your neck.” I watch the question bloom across your face. “Are these all you?”

I try to imagine myself through your eyes as I stand in my bedroom doorway, my hands covered in charcoal, lips slightly parted. For a brief moment our eyes meet. A look of recognition flashes through your eyes, then just as quickly, you look away.

You ask, “So what did you want to talk about?” The way your back is slightly slumped, your hair the usual mess, I can see the beautiful boy in you. The boy who I know designed cities, slayed dragons, captained ships as I once did. The boy who now sits on my bed and nods along as I tell him it’s over.

When the front door closes behind you, when I hear your canvas shoes scuff across the parking lot and your roommate’s van lurch to life, I return my markers and crayons to their cardboard boxes. I gather my drawings and tape them along the wall opposite my bedroom window, then curl up on my bed. I watch the pale sky disintegrate behind the alleyway dumpster, admiring the last pink brushstrokes of sunset before everything fades to black. In the darkness your absence is palpable. I register the loss like a fist to the gut. I think of the haikus I will never write you, the beats we will never dance to, the characters I will never play opposite you. A car drives down the alley. Its headlights cast a beam across my bedroom wall. I turn to see the light as it catches the women’s faces and then it is gone. Later, another car. In that split-second beam the light slashes through the room and the women come to life. Laughing, moaning, singing, howling before darkness overtakes them.

All night it is like this. The women watch over me as if they are trying to tell me something, as if they have not yet said all they have come to say.

Maria Vorhis is a writer and performer based in St. Paul. Her writing has appeared on stage, on screen, and is forthcoming in Pigeon Pages. She is currently at work on an essay collection entitled Clown and lives in a 130-year-old house with her husband and two cats. Find her online at www.mariavorhis.com

Erin Loree (Three Mountains, oil on panel) is a Toronto-based painter from a small town in Ontario, Canada. Through painting, she explores themes of transformation, inversion, and duality, with an emphasis on the process as a journey of discovery. She completed her BFA at OCAD University in 2012 and received a Certificate of Advanced Visual Studies from OCAD’s Florence Program. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in Toronto, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, and the UK. She has work in a number of collections including Toronto Dominion Bank, Holt Renfrew, and Imago Mundi. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2012 Drawing and Painting Medal, and Nora E. Vaughan Award from OCAD University, as well as an Ontario Arts Council grant. Loree’s work has been featured in YNGSPC.ca, MOMUS.ca, CBC Arts, the Toronto Star, Beautiful Decay, Booooooom, and Huffington Post. She is represented by Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton. Find her on Instagram @erin_loree.

This essay was originally published in Salt Hill 45.