Steve/Stephan -5minutefreewrite

For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/the-weekend-freewrite-11-16-2019-part-3-the-dramatic-twist

Spending ten days stuck in my own mind felt like being locked up in a cramped cell with a crazy person and not having any way out.
My own mind still calls me Stephan.

I haven’t been Stephan since college. It was what my parents called me, and then in college I tried it on again. But I’ve been Steve to the outside world since leaving the womb of academia. Co-workers don’t make fun of it. I can just sit in this cubicle and type.

But in my mind, I am Stephan. People don’t appreciate the power that a name like Stephan gives you. I am allowed to prefer pungent cheeses. I can sip wine slowly. Heck, if I’d taken an opportunity to get to know myself better, I may have become a sommelier.

But I didn’t. I panicked at my debt, and took a minimum wage data entry position at a firm with hermetically sealed … no. Just regularness. Regular fluorescent lights and an odd hum that drives away creative thought and leaves you just barely enough energy to do what’s been asked of you.

And now, I’m still in debt, I’m in my thirties, and I’m desperate to get to know anyone, especially myself. That’s why I took all my sick days and pushed them together, got a doctor’s note for a made up flu, and went to the cabin of my buddy Dawn’s for the ten days: a weekend, a workweek, and a three day weekend.

They found their way through the decrepit streets to an open square where they perceived a large archway with closed doors.
They perceived it with their eyes. They saw it. Of course, for Steve, everything was “perceived” now. He spent ten days at Dawn’s cabin, and came out kind of angry, but also convinced of his own specialness. Dawn simply saw the large archway with closed doors.

To be fair to Rome, it’s very old, so decrepit to these two is really just ancient and ruined, but preserved to everyone else. They were intent on finding slime and crime here, though, so the oldness of Rome became decrepitude and perceiving for Steve. Dawn had her own notions of what they were really doing, but she didn’t express them to Steve.

For Dawn, they were finally living life. She’d been Steve’s work buddy since they were both in their early twenties. She had a job she liked a lot more than he liked his, and couldn’t entirely understand his feeling of being stuck in a minimum wage job, but she’d grown up with a sense of being Dawn, and according to him, he’d always been Stephan, and had abandoned his identity in a panic when he left college. It can be hard to find oneself, she supposed.

A cigarette butt in front of the pot
On the stoop of the pizza restaurant told them they were in “real” Italy now. The locals smoked a lot, and didn’t really care about their own restaurants looking well-worn. It was only the tourist areas that had cigarette-free stoops. And so Dawn and Steve, or Stephan, as she had to remind herself to think of him, went inside, for a true taste of Italy, and to maybe find some of the crime and slime they were looking for.

They were not disappointed. The crime and slime was right there, probably. There were two young men with gel in their black hair staring at each other and clenching their jaws. Stephan thought they were probably young Mafiosos. Dawn thought they were probably teenagers who couldn’t decide how they felt because of the damn hormones. Both Dawn and Steve put them in baskets of personality, and didn’t think there was anything that could convince them these two were otherwise. Of course Guido and Don were just a couple college kids who had been just arguing about Marx, and they were angry, but that would pass as they reminded themselves that they couldn’t start a revolution alone, and certainly not before eating the pizza they had ordered. It was actually Italy, and they were going to eat actually Italian pizza, which, according to the internet is not really like American pizza, though having eaten pizza in Italy, I think is just someone being a contrarian. I mean, there are lots of different ways that pizza is made in the U.S. and I had several different ways of pizza in Italy, and some of them overlapped, at least generally.