When we first created your FreeToBe account, you included me and our Australian shepherd in all your pictures. I helped put your profile together, picked out that one photo from Christmas with your parents in Maine, you in blue flannel, me in a mauve velvet dress with my arm slung around you like I’d won you at a county fair. We wrote things like, “Into the ocean, not into fascism,” or “Love my partner. Hate state-sanctioned monogamy.” As I put on my night cream, we joked about the kinds of prospects who would take the bait—sincere twentysomethings with taut tummies who lived off the grid except for their iPhones. We described their floral tattoos and fading Leftist politics, me grinning at you from the bathroom mirror until you went into the bedroom and I stopped laughing and it took you a few minutes to notice.
The day we met you had told me you thought Instagram was just another form of government control. I thought this was a little redundant—they’d already started rationing the water by then, allotting people only ten cubes of ice per day. They’d put in place the “intent-to-marry” clause on every dating app. Why would Instagram be any different? I added you anyway, spent an evening drinking wine and scrolling through your photos. They were all blurred in movement from undergrad parties: Your mustache crooked on your Luigi costume as you sipped a Tecate on Halloween 2018. You and a group of friends posing in ’90s squats or throwing up peace signs in front of the Watts Towers in South L.A. From their comments, your college friends seemed like a concise crowd: “Faded af,” “Dem boyz.” I quickly logged off then because I knew you wouldn’t want me to see you like that—so ordinary.
I could tell you were attracted to me by the way you preemptively ground a Tylenol between your teeth as we spoke, the gallon-sized water bottle you kept by your side at all times. This was before the portable ice machines. We knew nothing about controlling the heat back then. Nobody understood why passion had suddenly become dangerous. In the early days, my friends and I joked over drinks that the danger in touching felt romantic, like living inside of Love in the Time of Cholera. “Honestly,” Reina said, fanning her face in the crowded bar, “It’s freeing not to have to worry about one-night stands. They were always too much pressure anyway.” She leaned her elbows on the table, looking tired, and she made me think about how exhausting being in our 20s could be, how sick I was of trying to capitalize on my youth. After decades of instant gratification we had returned to the methods of the Victorians—milk baths and leeches, bloodletting and pressure applied to the wrists. Anything that might cool us and keep us from thinking about sex.
At that first meeting I was sitting on the bleachers with a cold pack under my armpit. When you sat down next to me I could see the largeness of your pores, and for some reason it made me trust you. You squinted into the California sun and asked if I was a fire sign. “What do you think?” I said, shaking my dark curls so that they cascaded down my back, popping open my chest to reveal my tan. I knew I shouldn’t have tempted you like that.
“Year of the dragon,” you pointed towards yourself, between bites of Tylenol. You were shoving them into your mouth whole, like your mouth was a furnace that needed feeding.
We were both working at the summer camp, slogging through one last June of scratched knees and deflated handballs for different reasons. You, before your student loans kicked in. Me, because DJing could no longer pay the bills. I’d moved to LA to become an artist but instead I’d become a glorified nose-wiper. It was an in-between job, the kind you take during a recession. We were young people in the midst of our first end of the world.
You’d just finished a degree in Architecture. “My goal is utility. But still innovative,” you added, eyeing my lip ring expectantly. I could tell you’d never had to skip a meal in your life, that the state of our world, the course it was about to take, would be a shock to your system. You’d graduated from UCLA that past spring. Despite the steel shortage and the water crisis you were determined to make more beautiful, functional things. I could already tell I fell somewhere along this axis. Even years later, when our life together was a given, I’d catch you looking at me in the mirror, steering me up towards beauty or down towards function, replotting my worth. You were obsessed with ancient ways of building space—modernism and the Bauhaus movement—all ideologies of being together that felt Utopian and far away from the concrete architectures of Los Angeles, the silvery pulse of cars trying to merge along the 405.
Over the course of that first conversation, I learned that you had a septum piercing you hid up your nostrils from the camp’s administration and a New England family that you hated. I knew then that you’d seen my surname in the camp’s staff roster, wondered about the accent above the “a’s.” Your eyes clicked up and down my unspecifiable skin. I was used to that from types like you. In my suburban high school I’d always been what passed for my peers’ idea of exotic, boys who kissed me behind the gym and told me not to tell anyone. “I’m just waiting for my life to start,” you admitted, desire plain on your face. Maybe that’s what attracted me to you—you were direct. You owned your liminal space instead of acting like it was an identity in and of itself. You didn’t pretend to know much about me or about yourself.
After we’d talked through most of our lunch break we surveyed the playground in silence and watched adults dropping to the asphalt like dead flies. The camp had set up fainting stations where staff could rest if they got overheated. Disturbingly, it happened to the teen group counselors a lot, the crotches of their pants stiff as they fanned themselves.
The scientists said it was some combination of climate change and evolution, our inability to maintain heat in our bodies, which is to say, the weight of our own wanting. As the world started to slide away from us, we wanted more and more, and our bodies couldn’t take it. Online astrologers called it The Reckoning, a sign that global capitalism had wreaked its final havoc on our bodies, impeding our ability to procreate from within. In any event, all the CDC holograms advised that we partner only for protection, to have someone near to monitor the heat. Couples were instructed to stop copulating during the warning signs—tingling limbs, a warmth in the belly. “Don’t leave it until it’s too late,” they warned.
We flirted for weeks then finally you pushed me against a box of Legos in the supply closet and kissed me gently. After then we had to be careful, coming up for air between the white sheets of my bed, sprinting to the kitchen for water to bring down the temperature of our love. Our love felt like both thrill and revenge. I saw the secret desire of those behind-the-gym boys magnified in your eyes, making me look great and monstrous. Looking back, maybe it was that image I fell in love with before you.
I was one of the lucky ones; I wanted you in reasonable measure. We were attentive to each other, maternal almost, noticing beads of sweat on each other’s backs, stopping when we got close to an edge, to that fiery kick at the back of our throats. We installed a sink in the bedroom, just in case.
I thought you’d be a fling, something to occupy the summer with, but then you started learning Spanish so you could speak to my family. You cried in your sleep and I listened, my hand shifting up and down your chest. You saved my life in a way. I stopped DJing, stopped pressing myself up into unknown bodies in bathroom stalls, toying with my own death. You made me want to live for you, beside you. I started packing your lunches and cleaned your shaved hair out of the drain. You left more and more of your vintage Hawaiian shirts at my apartment.
“You’re sweet,” you said one night as you kissed my neck.
“Nobody’s ever told me that before,” I protested. But really what I meant was that nobody had noticed. Up until then I had curated a persona of hardness, listened to death-rattling punk, wore all black in summer.
You developed a habit of singing The Four Tops when we were fighting and I refused to speak. Reach out and I’ll be there, you belted, taking my hand and dropping to your knees, pantomiming your love until I couldn’t help but smile. You thought you’d softened me, but now I can be honest with you. My motives were purely forensic. I wanted to find what was lost in you and then extract it, like rotting food in the back of the fridge.
We moved quickly after that, just like the other young people veering dangerously towards their mid-20s. Your love pulled me into the middle class. We adopted our dog, Izzy. You joined a development firm that ripped out old houses and made them into sleep/work pods. I swapped DJing for UX design. We signed a lease on a duplex in Glassell Park. Yet as we grew more comfortable, you started wanting less. “Minimalism is akin to saintliness,” you said when you threw out our couch. Everything we sat or slept on was a perfect square. But luxury suited me. Every day I woke up grateful for our stocked fridge, the quietness of our block. You disapproved of my expensive moisturizers and nouveau riche skin. You got colder and colder when you slept.
Over the next decade, our lives started to inhabit each other’s. You tolerated my mess and I allowed you to stop salting our food (You’d read an article in the Atlantic that it was in everything, even soap.) Opposites attract, people used to tell us, until we stopped seeming opposites and became more like siblings. And as we grew older we became less like siblings and more like orphans, consolidating our kin. When one of our birth mothers died, I turned to you and said, “We only have one mother now.”
We no longer needed the bedside sink. We gave away some of our ice to our neighbors who were newer in their love, then prided ourselves on our generosity and restraint. We bought a house, filed our taxes together, took a trip to Spain. As you wandered off to inspect a hidden angel in the beams of La Sagrada Familia, I stayed behind, fanning my arms out under the stained-glass windows. My shoulder flushed blue, my wrists speckled orange and yellow. I looked up at the scaffolding, where the roof divided into steel tendons, mimicking the joining of muscle and bone. You’d started rationing our food by then, marking the milk container with what you thought should be our daily intake. I didn’t mind. I’d heard this was what adulthood was supposed to be like—restriction and order, sacrifice, then small bits of pleasure. Yet in that moment I realized how much I craved excess.
By then, sleeping next to you was like sleeping next to a ghost. You stopped singing when I was angry, forcing me to make my own way out of our arguments. The bed didn’t even jostle as you lay down beside me. Our house was always quiet, like living inside of a refrigerator. Still, when we had dinner parties, you came to life. I noticed the blood rush to the surface of your face. If I had reached down to your lap I was sure I would have found you stiff with your own self-recognition. I sat across the wooden farm table you’d made and stared at the friends we’d acquired over the last ten years: professors, lawyers, experts in climate change or gun violence. They all loved you. They seemed like perfect couples as they passed each other quinoa salad or anticipated a wine preference, their hands clasped over one another’s. I thought about La Sagrada Familia again, the vulnerability of all those tendons, our insides inverted. The candlelight bloomed over our friends’ faces and I couldn’t help but feel like my shadow was smaller than yours. That when they looked at me, they saw a less significant life. I should have been grateful. Most couples wished for boring, prayed for a partner that would still that fire-lust. I hated that I wanted more.
I downloaded FreeToBe on a whim. I’d gotten the code from a co-worker, a round woman with a shaved head who confessed in a whisper over lunch that she only took the job to study heteropatriarchy in the tech sector; she was writing her doctoral thesis on it. I nodded along as she dropped me the entry code via Signal. FreeToBe unlocked something both feral and childlike in me. Aa I clicked through holograms I felt like a wide-eyed traveler in a foreign land. I wanted to know who these vigilante types were, ready to risk it all for a possibly flammable fuck. In school we were taught that sex wasn’t important, that it was a fleeting impulse we should contain, ration out in small measure just for the purpose of procreation. But these under-the-radar types had whole philosophies about the emancipatory nature of desire, techniques to churn up the heat, harness it, use it as energy. They had dyed green hair and encrypted manifestos on the decline of civilization and the Fascist tenor of water rationing and court-sanctioned marriages, which you could buy for $5 on their Patreons. Others had no political agenda, no Utopic visions. They simply missed connection; I was fascinated.
I rendered a fake profile using a stock image from work—a woman with glossy hair and a diplomatic smile. I’d made my profile a Russian nesting doll of hobbies and erotics. This woman rock-climbed but she also knew the best nail salons. She was an anti-capitalist but was realistic about the inevitability of cryptocurrency. She read Sartre and also watched Too Hot to Handle. I figured there was something for everyone in her. I updated her education history (Brown undergrad, RISD MFA) and wondered if this woman in the stock image had a dating profile of her own, what she’d do if she came across this second self.
After work I’d sit in my car, scrolling. I took screenshots of the most entertaining dating profiles, keeping a catalogue of men who labeled themselves “financially inconsistent” or “funny in an asshole way.” Women who took great pride in fishing.
“If you listen to pop punk unironically do us both a favor and get the fuck into my DMs,” one person wrote. And I did. “Taking Back Sunday rules,” I wrote, rock on emoji. I messaged them song after song of Jimmy Eat World, Rooney, and All-American Rejects, writhing around our heated car seats, banging my head on the sunroof.
I always unmatched when they asked to meet in person. I never intended on going further than that. I just wanted to know how it felt to curate a desire, to see your personality twinned in someone else.
At home, I iced my neck, claiming I’d had a particularly strenuous yoga sessionwalked Izzy too far that day, and wondered where all my potential dates thought I went, precisely how long they’d mourned my ghosting. Me, the dream girl. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the last time we made love, the last time we’d come close to danger.
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I made a rookie mistake, leaving the app open while I showered. I’d transitioned to the desktop version so I could zoom in on people’s blackheads or the stray elbows of exes they’d cropped out. FreeToBe was purely anthropological at that point. That’s what I told you as we both peered down at what I had done, my wet hair darkening a sage green towel. “There’s a typo there,” you pointed, smudging the screen with your thumb print. You ran a long finger down your nose as you clicked through profiles, zipping past page after page of meaningless conversation.
That night, the backs of my feet practically kissed the kitchen ceiling as you ground into me against the sink. Izzy howled behind the door, upset at being left out. You ignored her. Your face grazed my thighs and moonlight seeped in through the laundry room, making the steel siding of the washing machine gleam. “You’re not mad?” I asked, panting in a heap on the guest room floor. “No,” you answered, pulsing a hand against your graeying temple, “It’s kind of hot.” I smiled. Maybe this was our rebirth, a way we could become shiny again.
Two weeks later, you turned 39. As you blew out your candles, you gave me a cheeky look. “You know what I want for my birthday?” I blushed expectantly. We’d been talking about having a baby. “A FreeToBe account,” you announced, and exhaled the candles out. “Will you get a code for me?” My mind went blank. “Just for a year,” you assured me. “Before we really have to grow up.”
You gave me a speech about how we had gotten away from ourselves in the last few years. “Remember how we used to be?” you asked me. By “used to” I assumed you meant my old apartment, the Hawaiian shirts, the era in which I didn’t need you. I nodded, but the electric shock in my stomach started to feel like a frozen river. This hadn’t been how I wanted to regain you, but what choice did I have? I drifted into our walk-in closet and Airdropped you the app link as I peeled off my underwear.
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I offered to drive you to your first date. You were so nervous you changed three times, your neck blotching with the effort of stripping clothes on and off. The tip of your nose was still red and crusty from a recent cold. Finally, you settled on the Joy Division t-shirt. But we never made it there.
It was Izzy who found you. As I unlocked the car I heard you groaning upstairsher barking upstairs, her murky eyes turned towards your studio, a garage apartment we’d converted the summer before to accommodate your desire to paint, your newest hobby already abandoned before you’d begun. . The sound buzzed the walls of your studio, a garage apartment we’d converted the summer before to accommodate your desire to paint, your newest hobby already abandoned before you’d begun. I found you among the unopened acrylic tubes and pristine canvases, gyrating your hips against the wall, groaning. I couldn’t tell if you were laughing or crying until you stepped away and I saw the flame lying there, blazing with your efforts to bring it into the world, ash all around its beautiful head, its fluttering gills and emerald eyes.
After the birthing you seemed neither happy nor sad. You pressed your palms against the exposed bricks and let out a long, low sigh. Your shoulders dropped. I felt closer to you then, less like your lover and more like your twin. We were the same. We both knew that desire for others was always, in some small part, a desire for self, and I understood that we’d never really be safe from it. I dabbed your forehead with our last two vials of ice then took you to the Emergency Room.
The doctor said you were lucky you hadn’t charred your insides. The mucus from last week’s cold had saved your life, birthing the heat, lubricating it, instead of combusting your organs. Our condition was rare. It wasn’t common but it also wasn’t unheard of to make a fire- being. They took on a life of their own, snowballed all of one’s thoughts and fantasies to make something alive. We’d heard that the Baitmans, our neighbors three doors down, had experienced something similar, but even then it was only an ember, and they’d moved away too quickly after that for us to ask.
The doctor prescribed us ten sessions of couples therapy. He said that talking about the flame directly—its causes and repercussions, its roots in our unmet needs—would slow down the burn. At home, he instructed us to contain the fires. “Usually they extinguish on their own through lack of oxygen,” he explained. I made up a room for her in our guest room.
With all that unwieldy red hair, the Fire-Being looked like an otherworldly version of me. She came equipped with the kind of elephantine ass I’d had when we’d first met. There were other bits of her that I recognized. Her eyes, for instance, though green, were my shape, and held the same double dose of trepidation and tenderness. Sometimes I caught her in the mirror, looking at me the way I used to look at you.
The night of her birth we gave her a milk bath to take down her temperature, massaged her new new skin. You brushed your hand against mine in the white liquid and held my gaze. There were loving tears in your eyes. When I put her into bed that night she was warm and glowing like a hot coin. Izzy tried to lick her palm but I stilled her tongue. At the hospital I had begun to worry, afraid that her beauty would follow me like a shadow until it swallowed me whole, that it would consume you too, that after years of remaining stone cold with me, you’d find your fire in your own creation, her curvature molded to perfection by your own imagination. But amidst our Tuscan Sunrise sheets, which we saved for visitors, she reminded me of spiced wine in Barcelona and sun-kissed beach days on the Riviera — pockets of memory familiar to us both. She was a body made of all our things and it was in this moment that I realized I could love her. I could raise your wild thing.
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The Fire-Being revitalized our social life. Over the weeks that followed, we became like one unit. She and I entertained your colleagues at dinner parties. You did the cooking. I set up the punchlines to her stories about wildfires and electrical storms. When she tired of filling your work mates’ stodgy silences, she cut the lamps then lit all the candles on the table with a flip of her hair. Then she blew them out, making patterns in the smoke with the tips of her long fingernails.
The head of your firm made a pass at her once, but she scorched him. No one could touch her, only you and me. At night she turned to ember, heating our backs as we made love frantically, our shadows arched and giant on the walls.
Sometimes we danced together in the mirror, playing a kind of leapfrog with her flame body, moving so fast that my own form blurred, enmeshed with hers. She reminded us both that we were allowed to live for pleasure, that we should. You took up singing, cycling through the Motown classics. Be my little baby, you cooed as she lit the stove to start dinner. You chopped the onions and I sautéed. Take me my darling, you sang, turning to me, your voice cracking gleefully on the high note.
When you were away for work she’d slip into my bed. At first we just lay there eating popcorn and watching reality TV, laughing at the endless ways people could humiliate themselves. But then she started teaching me things, like how to make fireballs with the friction between my hands. Soon, I could create flames from my fingertips and send electricity running through my veins. It was like learning a language that could only be articulated with my body; I’ve never felt more myself, less in need of holograms or text messages or words of affirmation, less in need of you, even. “Hey old friend,” you’d say to me, rubbing the small of my back, “I remember you.” Having the Fire-Being in our home was like having a time machine, a portal to our old selves, that nascent desire. Again I felt that California heat, the groove of the bleachers on the backs of my thighs, you squinting at me expectantly in the sun.
You loved our heat, but you couldn’t stand it for long. If you stood too close to us, your body would break out in boils, making you look like a lustful monster, as if your body was in the process of turning inside out. From the dining room, she and I bathed in the flames, rubbed our nipples against each other’s, let the sparks clip our hip bones. Your intolerance made you a happy witness to our power, laying back on the living room couch, smiling and naked as our lessons went on, falling asleep to the new shapes of our sparks.
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You started sleeping separately from us, under the protection of a fan and two smoke detectors. The boils got worse, darkening into royal purple and then into a blue-black, becoming more crater-like. You stopped going into work, working from the comfort of your bedroom, still belting out Motown lyrics when you had the energy. We did our best to care for you while keeping our distance, lowering ourselves to simmering blue sparks whenever we walked by your door, speaking to you in lullaby tones.
But one night you knocked on our door and said you missed us. We welcomed you in, flanked both sides of your body. I watched your burdened chest, now honeycombed with boils. They seemed beautiful in our glow, lit up from the inside like lanterns. I joined hands with her around you and I grew hot too. We created a fire circle, moving fast and faster until we couldn’t tell where our bodies began and ended. For a split second, you were one of us. You started singing.
It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized your noises were ones of pain and not pleasure. I watched your body combust as if you’d eaten a firework. It didn’t seem worth it to use the last of the ice; For the first time in years, we needed it so much. This felt like the way you’d want to go, in a pool of your own desire, us watching, your twin flames.
If you could see us now you’d be proud of us, I think. She has taught me how to build and sustain heat, how to work with the element, as it, instead of against it. Together we’ve achieved unimaginable pleasure. When she puts her tongue in my mouth I feel your early fire again, your heat in my old apartment that overlooked the 405. She feels just like you did then, a battery sleeping next to me, glowing in the dark.
I now see that she and I can’t live without one another; I was the heat that sparked her warmth within you. I like to think of her as your parting gift to me; She never bores me. She’s a torch of hope, of something bright yet to come.