“On a night like this, you can see the whole city,” you said.
We were standing a safe distance apart, ignoring the blocking and just saying the words, facing forward, as if we were doing a staged reading in a black box theater. When we’d started it hadn’t been good, exactly, but some of the venom had dripped away, slowly, and once we we’d gotten about halfway through—five minutes had become ten had become fifteen—we’d found a flow. We weren’t sparking, but we weren’t sparring, either. We were just voices rising and falling on the right beats, building a rhythm. Telling a story.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I wish I couldn’t see it at all. I long for the mountains back home.” Normally at that part I was supposed to be sitting next to you, leaning into your shoulder, and holding your hand. I knew we would skip the stage directions like we always did, and fly past the kiss without even discussing it, but still, it was getting close. I glanced over at you, expecting you to stop any second, roll your eyes, and tell me it was time for you to go. But you were just staring out at nothing, your focus somewhere far away.
“How can you say that?” you asked. “It’s so much better here. There’s so much . . . opportunity.”
“Sewing underclothing in a stifling factory until my fingers bleed doesn’t seem much like opportunity,” I said, trying to slow myself down—learning my lines high had been efficient, but they’d imprinted in a speedy rush that wanted to come out all at once. “The conditions were better traveling steerage.” My fingers twitched at my sides. I needed to do something with my body soon or else I felt like I would explode.
“That can’t be true,” you said. “Besides—” You were supposed to gesture out at the imaginary cityscape in front of us, the metaphorical future ahead, but instead you turned and looked at me. “This is just the beginning,” you said. “You speak as if this is the end.”
“Maybe I wish it was.”
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. My mind was racing and it was hard to stand still. But closing them only made the room tilt. Joy had been right again; I should have eaten more at dinner. I needed to hold on to something. I just wanted to feel grounded.
“I just want to feel something,” I said, gesturing wildly with my arms to release the pent-up energy. (Mom used to call it “shaking the sillies out.” We had a whole dance we’d do.) “I want to feel something other than homesickness.”
(It was Viola talking, but I was homesick, too, wasn’t I? Only not for some country across the ocean, but for my own apartment, where I used to feel so safe. When did that stop? How could I get back?)
“I want to know something other than sadness,” I said, my chest starting to tighten. “I want to see something besides my mother’s face as she—” Answers the door and doesn’t even seem to notice how fucked up I am. “As she . . .”
“Liv?” You were looking at me again, concerned this time.
“Sorry. Where was I?
“I want to see something besides my mother’s face.” You paused, a flicker of annoyance registering in your tensed jaw. “I thought you were off-book.”
“I am, I am. Right. OK. I want to see something other than my mother’s face as she lay dying,” I said, the words tumbling out too fast again. “I want to touch something—” You. I wanted to run across the room and touch you, hold your hand, lean on your shoulder, raise my fingers up to your chin and pull you down toward me and kiss you, breathe you in. “—other than a sewing needle,” I finished, feeling my face flush.
“I think we can stop,” you said.
“No! I want to keep going.” This time my voice came out louder than I’d meant it to, almost a shout. You took a step back.
“OK, you seem weird . . . I don’t think you should . . .”
“Just let me finish!” I cried, my eyes suddenly filling with tears. “I want to finish my monologue!”
I’m not sure what made me break—why that moment was the tipping point when I’d been teetering on the edge for months—but something just swelled up inside, so fast I barely saw before it broke the surface. I was scared (my first thought, a whisper in the dark: Did I take too much?) and deeply, deeply sad—and embarrassed, a little—but mostly, against all odds, I was grateful. Because finally, even if Ethan didn’t, I understood what Viola was feeling on that bridge, and why she had run there. For the first time, maybe in my whole life, I could say lines and actually mean them.
“I want to feel something more powerful than I am,” I said, my breath coming in gasps, the tears blurring my vision. I was glad I couldn’t see you. “I want to feel the current dragging me under. I want to feel something that makes me know I was alive once. I just want—” My voice broke then, because I couldn’t stand it anymore, how true it was, and I didn’t care anymore who knew.