May 2015. A Saturday night in late spring. There is a cool chill in the air after dark that catches the world by surprise.

Lights up: a proscenium theatre. A DRAG QUEEN sings.

House left: HE sits, next to R. They are here to see Pig Iron Theatre’s I Promised Myself to Live Faster at Fringe Arts. It’s one week shy of his 1-year anniversary of living in Philadelphia. HE is no longer living out of his car, on the road, in the desert, writing a book in fits and starts. It’s the end of a difficult week, a difficult month, a difficult life—they are sensitive soft-shell types, so they know that it will be good to sit close and look out.

(It’s a full circle kind of night: their second date was seeing a production of Pig Iron’s 99 Breakups at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts: docents guiding the audience from break-up scene to break-up scene, staged throughout the museum—ninety-nine in all. It’s an experiment in placing the private in public, says the director—a device HE will learn to use well in the many years to come. That time, HE wore his best broke-back butch look: corduroy jacket with wool interior, denim jeans, leather cap-toes, bound breasts, a handrolled cigarette behind his ear. It was a late summer Sunday night; HE promised HE would have her home by midnight, and HE kept it.)

In three days, HE will get the call—his aunt is dead. You don’t have to come, his mother will say, and if you do, please come alone—the shame of poverty and mental illness guiding their every move. At the funeral, voice cracking, HE will read “Patients” by Aurora Levins Morales—a poem about the injustice of medicine for the poor. After, in a rare moment of connection, his brother the doctor will tell him he liked it.

August 2015. In three months, on a late summer day in the park, sitting under a tiny tree that does not protect them from the sun’s August heat, HE and R. will break.

July 2016. One year after that, they will meet again, in that same park, across the green: photo negatives of their younger selves under that tiny tree, looking out toward their future selves that they cannot yet see—trying to make amends. HE will cut his hair and press his shirt. HE will bring peaches, just in case. After, they will walk to the farmer’s market. R. will bury her face in purple speedwells, freshly cut, and ask him, “Aren’t they beautiful?”

September 2016. In one year and three months, HE will begin graduate school a second time with Pig Iron’s School for Advanced Performance Training.

November 2016. Three months after that, HE will quit mid-term—“I have a full-time job and a book to finish and a life to tend,” HE will say. HE will walk away, but stay close.

October 2016. In one year and four months, HE and R. will be seated side by side again, listening to the call of Kol Nidre.

(Two years before this to the day to the hour—under the same stained-glass dome that crowns the chapel with angels rising—a man whom they did not know gathered them under the canopy of his tallit gadol, like lovers on their wedding day.)

This time, like last, they will annul all vows—a queer kind of custom in which Jews attempt to enter the new year with no promises, kept or broken.

May 2017. Seven months after that, R. will greet him at the airport, along with their friend, who will bring a pineapple (doctor’s orders). Four days after this, they will become lovers, yet again. HE will carry scissors in his pocket. They will try not to fuck. She will come in her pants. They will build a fire and burn their words and keep certain ones a secret. R. will give him keys as a gesture of forgiveness. HE will continue to use the doorbell (some things you just can’t shake).

April 2018. Ten months after this, they will break a second time.

October 2019. Six months shy of two years after that, HE will be on an airplane, yet again—this time west to east. HE will have waited and counted and built and known to write in the future perfect tense, about the ending, or not, of this story. HE will have started with the opening scene at the theatre on a Saturday night in late spring—and a song about running out of time. HE will have written down the names of the months and the days and the years and the clothes that HE wore and some of the words that were said like patients and beautiful and tend. HE will have cut his hair. HE will have pressed his shirt. HE will have packed his newest bluest suit—the one with the paisley lining and the lavender stitch near the wrist and although HE would never admit it the one that HE will have bought for this very scene five years in the making to the day to the hour.

Blackout.