TWELFTH NIGHT BEGINS with a shipwreck.
Viola finds herself washed ashore on an unknown land with nothing but the tattered clothes on her back. Behind her: a vast ocean. Beyond that, the life she left behind. She thinks everyone else on the ship must have perished because she’s alone on this deserted beach. The land, she will soon discover, is called Ilyria.
I want to go there. I want to be like Viola—weather the storm, then start over, using nothing but my wits and charm to see me through to my happy ending.
Destiny is hard at work in Ilyria. Cosmic love and mistaken identity and strange serendipities. In Ilyria, nothing is what it seems, yet despite this confusion, it is a land of wonders. This production has turned Shakespeare’s island into a lush Turkish outpost, with jewel-toned pillows piled on the floors, low tables, hookah pipes, and stained-glass lamps that cast ruby-colored shadows over the stage. The actors all wear flowing costumes—harem pants and elaborately embroidered corsets. My mind is spinning with ideas for our own production and part of me can’t wait to get home and get back to work.
As I sit watching the Oregon Shakespeare Company perform, my mind wanders not to you but to Gideon, who’s sitting next to me. Whose knee is slightly touching my own after he shifts in his seat. I feel a little like Viola does at the beginning of the play—storm-tossed and wary, trying to find her footing in a complicated world. And, also like Viola, I can feel something hopeless and fragile and terrifying bloom in my chest—a feeling I’m not supposed to have because I’m not allowed to have it, not while I’m with you.
“If it be so, as ’tis,” Viola says, “Poor lady, she were better love a dream.”
Viola is in love with Count Orsino, but she can’t tell him because she’s posing as a boy. She’s essentially his manservant and Count Orsino is decidedly straight, which means her chances of him falling in love with her are slim to none. Viola can’t come out and tell Orsino who she really is because being a woman alone in a world where that’s not the norm could be potentially dangerous. Scene after scene I watch as Viola struggles in vain to hide her feelings, forced to help the count woo Olivia, a woman he thinks he loves but who has actually fallen in love with Viola (Olivia thinks Viola is a dude named Cesario—it’s like this whole complicated thing: mistaken identity, star-crossed love, the whole shebang).
Gideon leans over to me, his lips close to my ear, his hot breath trailing down my neck.
“Even though we know the ending, I’m like, Oh my god, if they don’t get together … This is killing me,” he says.
Me too, I think. But I know he’s only talking about the play. I turn my head slightly and our lips are so close— “Me too.”
Our eyes lock and the soft darkness makes me bold. I don’t look away. I should, this is wrong, but in his eyes I see a spark, an intensity that wasn’t there before I boarded the bus to Oregon and sat next to him, planning a trip around the world.
“Oh time,” Viola is saying onstage, “thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie.”
TWENTY-NINE
Gideon is teaching me about God.
And Bj?rk.
For the past few weeks, he’s been getting me into the crazy music and poetry he digs, bringing me books and giving me playlists every few days. I write him long letters and he writes me back. Turns out, we both like to keep it old-school with pens and paper instead of impersonal emails. I love touching the lined notebook paper and knowing he’s touched it, too. I like tracing the grooves he runs into the paper with his pen.
I’d forgotten how much fun it is to have a guy friend. I like seeing the world through his eyes: to Gideon, the universe is a messy delight. He’s interested in deep stuff: the Big Questions, like why are we here and what are we supposed to do with our lives? I realize I suddenly want to know the answers to those things—or at least be asking the questions. I like what Gideon shakes up in me. In his universe, there is no judgment, no rules that take you away from yourself. He’s fucking Yoda, is who he is. He’s making me hungry for my future, for all the things I’ve dreamed of.
Gideon and I are just friends. I swear.
Except.
In those few minutes before I drift off to sleep, I don’t think about you—I think about him.
This is a problem.
“You’re sort of my guru now,” I say, handing him back the collection of Rumi poetry he lent me.
Gideon laughs as he puts the battered book into his messenger bag—I wonder how many times he’s read it. “Man, I’m gonna have to get some guru clothes, then.”
“Nah,” I say, pulling a little at his shirt because it’s an excuse to touch him, “this is perfect.”
His eyes fall to mine and we do that thing we’ve started to do—look, look, look until I break away, flustered and scared and so alive I can barely stand it.
Today he’s wearing a shirt that looks like an old GameBoy screen—Tetris, the one where you have to get all the bricks to match up as they come down the screen, faster and faster. My friendship with Gideon feels like that game: like those bricks in Tetris, we’re trying to fit together as quickly as possible. Quick, before you find out about us and then Game Over.
You’re joy, Rumi says about God. We’re all the different kinds of laughing.
You’ll be given love, Bj?rk sings out, sweetly innocent: you just have to trust it.
I don’t know what you’d call the thing Gideon gives me every day, but it makes me happy.
Until I think about you and then I feel sick to my stomach because I am the worst girlfriend ever. It’s taken me weeks to admit this to myself, but I’m emotionally cheating on you.
“So you liked them?” he asks. “The poems?”
“I loved them,” I say. Gush. And here I go again. I forget all about you. “Rumi is so … happy.”
“Right?”
Gideon and his parents are what you’d call spiritual but not religious. I haven’t been to his house, but I can imagine incense burning next to a statue of Buddha, which sits against a wall with a cross on it. There’s probably a yoga mat on the floor and, I don’t know, Indian Hindu songs playing in the background.
“I love how he doesn’t discriminate,” I say. “Like, you get the impression that, for him, God doesn’t have all these rules and boundaries and stuff. You can be a Muslim like him or a Christian like Nat or nothing specific like you and me … whatever. It’s all good.”
We drift over to a corner of the drama room, as is our habit these days. A little away from everyone else, but in public.