I remember going to the Shakespeare Festival and seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Jamie. I think it was their first ever Shakespeare Festival show, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a very special play to them because they had played Puck when they were a child. This production was so colorful and bright—I swear everything was covered with lights! It made my lighting designer heart sing. Jamison was enthralled, even reciting Puck’s concluding monologue under their breath, God bless them. They’re an even more verbal theatergoer than I am.
A lot of the cast members were also in that season’s production of Romeo and Juliet, my favorite play. One scene that had the audience in fits of laughter featured the actors playing the titular star-crossed lovers. How cool it was, that Jamie and I got to see our favorite plays that season, share them together in some way.
At the curtain call, the talented young woman who had gotten so many laughs out of us wept. “Aww,” Jamie said, pointing to her. “Closing night.”
I don’t remember what our next show of the season was that we saw together. I think it was something more obscure, Timon of Athens, probably. It was good. Neither of us were familiar with the story before then.
I couldn’t stop crying that night. It exhausted me, which made it hard to sit through the play, but it was luckily pretty short for a Shakespeare. During intermission, Jamie and I talked about how I was tired of friendship being so short, of all the love I find in summer jobs and semester-long classes being so brief. I was tired of being full of love and being received with emptiness, of watching people make friends around me in the exact same circumstances, of being convinced it was that there was something so fundamentally wrong about me that no one wanted to love me. I was wrapped in the signature One Direction blanket that Jamie had gotten to know so well on the study abroad trip to England the summer before, where we became friends and saw our first Shakespeare play together.
They kept it real, asked if I put in the work to be a friend to these people, meeting them at their door and walking to breakfast with them and things like that. I said I did. I thought it was true; at this point I don’t know. The reason they asked is because I have a tendency to be withdrawn.
They also said they weren’t sure that the sustainability of the friendship mattered. Was a short-lived friendship less valuable than a long-term one? Intellectually, I knew it wasn’t. Or is it something people like me say to ourselves just to cope?
I think I told them that I knew that or that I had been spending time working on being okay with that. But I don’t know if it matters how much work I put in (or pretend to put in?) learning how to self-love. Sometimes I just want to be chosen forever. For once.
It was too embarrassing to admit in the moment, but the reason I couldn’t stop crying was because it was our last show of the season, our last of many theatrical adventures together. It felt like a sign, a symbol of the end of our friendship, another circumstantial thing that concluded along with the circumstance in question. Losing Jamie would kill me. This is embarrassing to say too, but I more or less knew we were destined to be best friends the second I met them.
It’s been nearly two years since then. Jamie and I have been texting about this piece. When I sent them the first draft, they said, “How does it feel to know the atoms of our soul once made up the same star?”
Elizabeth Day is an author, poet, blogger, and playwright from Las Vegas, Nevada. Her work has been featured in The Just Girl Project, Empyrean Literary Magazine, Contemporary Jo, Hey Young Writer, and Fterota Logia. She is a student at Southern Utah University studying English education with a creative writing emphasis and double minors in theater and film. You can find her on Instagram @itsanadventur.
Featured image by Kyle Head on unsplash.
