It's how I spend time, sometimes, when I'm bored. Time to re-invent my signature, make it more of a reflection of how I am. Less shaky, maybe, eliminate these needless curves, something that looks flashy yet refined. Perhaps even more economical. I'll leave a few letters out this time, or insinuate them with a dot or line. I do this during play rehearsal when my scene's not up. Rehearsal is tiring and repetitive motion helps restore confidence and focus. Rehearsal is tiring because you're shifting continuously, in and out of your character, between the ex-priest and his past, building up a wall so that the character is unaware of blocking, correct inflection, or how there are no walls in his friend's house, just rows of chairs filled with spectators then arduously climbing up the wall minutes later to hear the notes from my director. Rehearsal even seems an inadequate word for what I am doing...I'm still struggling to firmly pin the character down, make his decisions for him. It changes every day with new information and discovery; it could even change on stage, depending on the night, the itchiness of the costume sweater vest, the intensity of the pace the cast decides upon unconsciously. It wears me out, and I write my name down.

You look over the sheet of paper and the century of names, and they are all alike, but nowhere near identical. What shifts from name to name? Is it the pulse, an effect of the heart? Or is it in the nerves, stimulus and response, a psychological deterrent against uniformity? Then the names become days or hours, your shifting moods and ideas anchored to the constant of your face, your wardrobe, your saw tooth smile and nodding eyes.

The paper crumples between your two hands, your unique fingerprints half-retained on its wrinkled surface, and it is thrown away...What is it like to name your baby? It seems like it should be a source of paranoia or at least deep concern: the words attached to a person whose personality hasn't yet crystallized, whose features are not refined or even formed. It's like buying a gift for the host of a party you are going to without knowing anything about them. How could it possibly be apt and eternally worthwhile?

But it does, somehow, come to mean you. This bodiless twin you were born with, your name. Through the years it shapes you by hearing it said, the inflections and emotions friends and strangers give it, from your mother's scolding to your lover's pounding chants.

I'm standing on a stage saying my lines. In this play I am an ex-priest, a friend of the family, and a former lover of one of the leads. It's a complicated role. I don't really look the part, but the director believes in me. It's a student play anyway, the cast and audience all made up of twenty-somethings, and those of us in this unified age group, this third decade of our lives, have the ability—or maybe even the need—to translate what we see into something relevant to ourselves, our point in time. The twenty-somethings of the cast are seen as the fifty-somethings of the play's world, not just in the sense of suspended disbelief, but also in the sense of prophecy and self-image.

We are at the time when we must juggle our whole lives, keeping a careful eye on whatever stage is in the perilous position of mid-air. We must pick and choose from our past, our childhood, taking what is valuable and rejecting that which is either painful or obsolete. We must stay in the present because that is what is expected of us as the trend-setters for the trend-starved portion of the population. We must enjoy our bodies while they last, stretching, flexing, reaching out one hand for another, rolling in bed in unison while still thrusting away, moving as if cameras are always zooming in. From here on out you only get fatter, hairier, spongier, blind, deaf, and dumb—for the sake of the eyes watching you from both ahead and behind, use your body's prime! Cue the kiss, drive your knuckles through some fucker's forehead, come on her face with well-timed accuracy, the perfect moment for the perfect image. Motivate your elders' fantasies; live a life the teen queens will want to usurp, because after this, it's all downhill, brother. Your term is over, there's new blood, ankle biters and Persians rising up in the east, or you've become a father, made partner, lost a limb, and life has seized the reins from your eager hands and is now taking you for a ride. So we prepare, throwing the bones of culture on the ground and trying to read what it will be like, what to know, how to act like a fifty-something, what to fear and regret or how to avoid those things altogether.

And through it all—your name. You think it's the only thing you really own, but is it? It's more like something on a screen, a designation, a part with eternal significance played by several actors with different faces, different voices. When are you really you? You sit in the tub with an overturned glass of juice on the tiles next to you, and, startled, you think, "Jesus, did it just happen again? Did someone else just take over?" You wonder if maturity or something like it pays that much attention to timetables; isn't it more like plates shifting underneath the earth? So that, in mid-afternoon, your fault lines shudder and you suddenly realize you don't like that song anymore, in fact, you hate it, despise it, want to publish manifestoes against it. Your lover is no longer attractive to you either in her familiarity or her façade; the apartment suddenly has a smell and that's when you put your finger on it—that smells like the old me. Open the windows! Then, in the midst of your furious scrubbing and cleansing the phone rings—Are you there? "Yes, yes! Speaking..."—and things seem somewhat stable. The new House has assumed control, and it's time to secure the borders.

Burn all photographs! Recall all love letters! Shred all records! Delete the poems from the hard drive! Masquerading as a private investigator you call people up from your past and future to find out what they know, what they remember about you. We'll see if it all checks out or if there are kinks, inconsistencies, conflicts with what you hope to become, what you irrevocably are now. Murder the ones who know too much; sweet-talk and bribe the others so that their story jives with the facts you've written down on your little spiral notebook.

I'm on the stage, and in this play I die, I get poisoned by my former lover, and I remain on stage, sitting at the kitchen table, dead as disco. Each time the play is performed my mind drifts somewhere else. I don't listen to the other actors arguing through the climax and crying during the resolution—limbo. I'm unaware of the audience even, just concentrating on errands I have to run tomorrow or revising an intro paragraph for a research paper, writing it in my head then mentally going over it in ink so that it sticks. The play ends and I rise from the kitchen table and take the few steps to the proscenium where I shed the ex-priest character (that's really all he is, an ex-priest) with a bow and become me, actor, viewer, pussy-ass bitch, stand-up guy, irresponsible drinker, straight-A student, clueless hipster, feverish and healthy, an object of applause.