By Haley DiRenzo

I’d text him after parties to come over when my roommate would be out. It was never terribly late, because I usually wanted to leave a place the moment we arrived. A gaggle of girls pin-balling through the door with the force of a landslide.  

These people never saw more than the surface – the cigarettes in your pocket, the lipstick on your teeth. I was just a body double, the traced chalk on the sidewalk marking the place where someone more interesting had been. I couldn’t be myself in these spaces with all these people performing. But I performed too, wrapped my fingers around the cups given to me, and brushed the hair out of my friends’ faces while glancing sideways around the room. Looking for someone, waiting for something to happen. 

So I would ask him to come over, and we would talk about philosophy and medical school applications and our conservative families – two boring people away from all the places where we had to act like we weren’t boring. The conversation before the sex a balm over a wound, making me believe this was more than just physical. I’d convince myself this was what I was looking for, the cure to the loneliness I felt around everyone else, something that might make me want to stay. That might ease the knots I felt forming during every other moment of trying to become who I was.  

“Should you stay over?” I asked one night. Thinking it would be nice to wake up together, make coffee, eat bagels, play pretend. “Maybe I shouldn’t,” he said. “Maybe that will turn this into something it’s not. Something complicated.” 

He warned me from the beginning – that he would not be my anchor or my remedy. That he wouldn’t make me feel more solid in those moments when I was melting. He would never show up in those places where I was searching for rescue, catch my frantic eyes, and be the reason I stayed. But still I called him over. Escaping one performance for another. Pretending he would see something inside my fading outline before I washed away completely. 

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Haley DiRenzo is a writer, poet, and practicing attorney specializing in eviction defense. Her poetry and flash pieces have been published with or recently accepted by a handful of online literary journals including Eunoia Review. She lives in Colorado with her husband and dog.