Five Years

“Where do you see yourselves in five years?”

Stevie and I stare at each other through the screen. He’s against a red background and the camera lighting is only highlighting how tired he looks. I should’ve offered him some of my concealer, I think, with fondness.

“How do I look?” he asks as they adjust the focus.

“Good, a little shiny.”

“You look good too,” he says.

I’m not sure how they’re shooting this, with both of us facing a camera so that we can see each other through the screen, but I notice something is off just before Stevie says:

“I’m seeing a mirror image of you.” Yes, that’s it. The Stevie I know has a left nostril that extends slightly lower than the right. This stranger has the opposite.

“It’s your evil twin,” I say.

We’re being interviewed for a documentary about relationships. I actually don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about it, so I’ll just say it’s about a couple who are couples therapists. For the first part, we sat on a blue velvet couch next to each other and were interviewed by one of the directors. For this segment, we’re sitting in separate rooms facing each other, a camera set up in front of each of us, and we’re talking to each other, albeit through a screen and in mirror image.

“Where do you see yourselves in five years?” The question shouldn’t be such a stumper, but for us it is. I feel weird saying I hope to have a book published, so I don’t say that.

“I hope to be licensed as a therapist,” Stevie says. “We’ll have a seven year old. God willing.” I laugh.

“I hope to be writing more,” I say.

“Maybe we’ll have another kid?” he says.

“What?”

Stevie shrugs. It’s true that lately my soft no to the prospect of having a second child has turned into a soft maybe. What sounded like a terrible idea a few months ago suddenly seems like it might be quite nice. Maybe just because Maya is no longer a baby and part of me wants to have a baby again. That’s how they get you. I even find myself getting nostalgic for being pregnant, even though when I read my one line a day journal every night, I’m reminded that at this time two years ago, everything hurt and I could never get comfortable—standing, sitting, lying down, all unbearable. I begged Stevie to rub my feet every night because standing on them all day was such a chore and I almost cried with grateful relief when he begrudgingly took my swollen tootsies in his hands. But the biological imperative has me looking back at it all with rosy glasses. Maybe it’s because LA was just on fire, and I want Maya to have an apocalypse buddy. You might be thinking that wanting to have more children in response to a devastating fire in a winter with no rain that surely forecasts a future with less rain and more fire, due to climate change caused by overusing the earth’s resources due to there being an unsustainable number of humans already on this beautiful planet, simply doesn’t make sense. But what does make sense? What are we even doing here? Does any of this make any goddamn sense?

While I was vacillating between a soft maybe and a soft yes, I had been under the impression that Stevie was still a chubby no.

“Maybe we’ll have another kid?” I stare at him on that red background. He bites his lip provocatively. I want to say something funny in response to this bomb drop, but I’m just so surprised that I sit there with my mouth hanging open.

“I think it’s interesting that you’re choosing to say this on camera right now,” I say, feeling secretly excited.

The night we got home after evacuating due to the LA fires, Stevie and I woke up having sex with each other. It just kind of happened and then continued, building as we gradually woke up to what we were doing. Moments of raw desire such as this were rare in our current reality, sex without any negotiating or feeling of pressure or mismatched libido. Afterwards, as we peed and checked the time, we mused about how it had all started. Neither of us could remember.

Stevie and I were all about unconscious desire in the beginning, going back to that hot AF day in May 2022 when we stayed home from the Rennaisance Faire and ate deep dish pizza in bed and ice cream cones and watched Fantastic Planet and had sex twice without a condom because I was on day seven of my cycle and thought I couldn’t possibly be fertile. The day Maya was conceived. We’d been talking about having a baby ever since that first night we were together in January, in our friend’s backyard on 2CB, when Stevie, sitting above me on the arm of the couch, put his hand on my belly and said:

“Maybe we’re going to have a baby.” And in that moment we were Jesus and Mary Magdalene (Stevie even looked like Jesus back then with his long hair and matching beard) and it felt inevitable that yes we would have a baby. As if ordained, this would be part of our journey, perhaps even the reason we’d been brought together. I know it sounds mystical. Ever since my total ego death on the psychedelic toad medicine Bufo Alvarius in December 2021, everything in my life had taken a turn towards the mystical.

(May 2022)

When we found out we were pregnant five months later, in the bathroom of the apartment I still shared with my ex, Shawn, I was both excited and disappointed. I had hoped to call it in consciously, to have what my friend Falk described as “that good baby-making sex.” I didn’t want the pregnancy to be a mistake, but I also wasn’t ready to consciously choose it. We had been planning to wait a year. We had so much traveling we wanted to do. Maya had other plans.

When the Eaton Fire broke out, we evacuated with friends to an Airbnb in Oceanside after we awoke on Wednesday to a red sky and air that smelled like an ashtray. As I drove back to LA on Sunday, in a rare moment to myself with Maya asleep in her car seat and Stevie up at school in Santa Barbara, I fantasized about being pregnant again.

If I got pregnant now, we would have a little Scorpio baby, I thought to myself as I cruised up the 5. If we waited until March, we could have a little Sagittarius. That idea appealed to me. Maya, like Stevie, is an Aquarius, born two days before his birthday. What if for our second baby, we had a little Sagi, like me. That would be soooo cute, if we each had a little mini me. I am curious about how our genes would remix a second time. Besides, I’ve always kind of felt like we would have a second child, whether we chose to or not.

“You know you have a say in the matter, right?” I could hear the voice of my very pragmatic friend, with whom I’d shared this sentiment. Surely she knows where she sees herself in five years.

“Where do you see yourselves in five years?”

I think back to five years ago. January 2020. I was performing in a play called Earthquakes in London with Rogue Machine Theatre at Electric Lodge in Venice, playing an incredibly pregnant woman who is walking across London to throw herself off London Bridge because of her paralyzing anxiety over bringing a child into this world in the throes of climate change. It was a musical. I was working two jobs: as a development assistant at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood and a cocktail waitress at Idle Hour in North Hollywood. I spent about three hours a day in my car. I was renting a room from friends in a house in Highland Park, in a new relationship with Shawn. Then COVID hit, Shawn and I moved in together to the apartment in back of the house I was living in, I quit both my jobs, we adopted a puppy and, with free money from the government, bought an old VW van that turned out to be a lemon.

If you had asked me then where I saw myself in five years, would I have said in a relationship with someone I didn’t know yet, with whom I now had a two year old? Would I have said I’d still be living in LA, just up the street in Highland Park, in the house of a friend I didn’t know yet who was in a relationship with another friend I didn’t know yet, with whom Shawn is now in a relationship, living together in our old apartment?

I stare through the screen at Stevie’s evil twin.

“Maybe we’ll have a goat,” he says. “I’ve always wanted a goat.”

“And two kids,” I say.

“Or two goats.”

“And one kid.”

(Earthquakes in London, photo credit: John Perrin Flynn)