Someone might even see me as selfish. Motivated by all the wrong reasons. And maybe they would be right. It’s just so hard to see outside of myself sometimes. The lies I was fed have been digested with assistance, and now I feed them to her with the same medicine.

“I have a job,” she says with a yawn.

“When?”

“This afternoon. But other than that, I’m free. We should do something.”

“Do something?”

“We should go to the movies or something. Something normal.”

“Are you trying to make it sound as though we’re not ordinarily normal? Because I think we’re absolutely saturated in normalcy. Just a nice little lesbian prostituting couple from the big city.”

Only, one of us is wearing a mask the other either can’t or refuses to see and she stacks indiscretions and dishonesty like limp bodies one on top of the other until her view of the wide-open door is utterly obstructed.

Lie to forget.

“If they make this into a movie, I want Cate Blanchett to play me,” she says, absent-mindedly playing with escaping strands of my hair.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“She seems a bit too…formal.”

“I’m totally formal. Whatever. Who do you want to play you?”

Me?

“I’d play myself.”

“Boring!”

“Why?”

“Who wants to play themselves? It would be weird. It would be like…I don’t even know. How do you do that?”

“Play yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“You just…you act out a version of yourself that’s close to who you actually are, but not quite. You would have to see yourself the way other people see you, all while acknowledging…somehow showing that something lies beneath the surface that contradicts everything. Enough to make people interested in you. And even then, you know…it’s fine. Everything’s fine. People never actually want to know who you are, Spencer, ok? They just don’t. They think they do, but look…think of who you are. Who you really, really are and ask yourself if that’s a mess anyone would willingly sort through with you. Who would admit—through consent—that they want to jump into a big pile of shit with you—your own shit, at that—and wade around for years and years? And if they do, then that just means that whatever they’re hiding must be even worse than what you’re hiding. Their shit must make your shit look like a walk in the fucking park. You would drown in whatever it is that makes them who they are.”