by Seth King
Since my life had a tendency to fall to pieces when I was awake, I went to bed for a few days. Those first few nights without him were so hard – all I did was clutch my pillows and stare at the dark windows feeling nothing and everything. I was a different person now. It was that simple. What could you do when you grew into someone else’s soul and then they stepped away? Half of me felt gone. I didn’t want to live in a world after Nicky. (And because he’d told me about his habit of sending breakup letters to all his exes, I avoided my mailbox like a disease for a few weeks. I hated myself enough already, and I’d rather stab myself than possibly have to face all the reasons he’d found me undesirable and dumped me.) To distract myself I started trying to read one of those teen novels set in a ruined version of the future where some down-on-her-luck girl was somehow destined to save whatever was left of her nation, but I didn’t need some author to imagine a wrecked world for me. This place was already a nightmare, so hateful and scornful it had made two boys flee from true love and tell themselves they were content with existing in a silent hell. This world was already a dystopia, and I lived it every day. No author needed.
We’d already broken up multiple times, of course, so I knew the drill. The boy who’d survived a chaotic childhood and countless schoolyard insults and a borderline-abusive father would not be felled by a simple breakup. Kicking-and-screamingly, I went back to my stupid routine, my stupid life as I’d known it Before Nicky. I watched Netflix, I walked the beach, I read books that meant nothing to me, I took a few pictures. But no matter what I did, I just couldn’t think straight – my thoughts circled back on themselves in an endless loop of sameness. When school started up after Labor Day, it was as bland and unfulfilling as ever. All of it felt useless and pointless, like I was living someone’s else’s life in someone else’s body. I halfway waited for Nicky to text me, call me, message me, like he would before. Sometimes the things I’d said in that hotel room seemed a thousand years old. We loved each other – why not be together? Why run from something like that? And we’d broken up a million times – surely he’d come back, right? He had to.
But he didn’t. Even though I somehow felt with everything in me that he wanted to.
At night I would turn it all over and over in my mind, dipping into the memories like they were a warm tub, and that gave me some comfort. At least enough to numb the pain in my bones. I knew I had to let go of these memories – I’d never get them back and I knew it – I just didn’t want to. So I held on. I kept remembering. And I tried harder to keep going. I took pictures of strangers. I reached the end of an amazing Netflix show and went into mourning before picking a different one to start. And still that boy wouldn’t leave. I was learning the hard way that love would not just go away. It would not exit in the night like the last guest at some party. It slithered around in your soul, demanding to make its presence known, and denying it only made it more desperate to be seen. The faster you ran, the tighter it choked you. Because love was a tree root growing under a sidewalk; a vein of lava simmering under a mountain range. Put something in love’s path and it will crack stone, conceal love and it will break through and move mountains. Deny love and it will explode, run from love and it will overtake you. Kill love and watch love’s revenant, imprison love and watch it break free and sing. Soon I accepted that no headphones would drown out his noise, no book would snuff out his magic, no crowded bar would blot out the black silence inside me: I was suffocating at the absent hands of Nicky Flores.
Everywhere I looked, there he was. Beneath an underpass as I rushed by, staring at me from the shadows, those galaxy-green eyes like spark plugs in the dark. Watching over me as I settled into my bed for another sleepless night, his smirk just south of a smile. And on the rare nights when I did find sleep, I’d sink into the vanished vividness of him, the boy who had loved me so much, he’d disappeared. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I felt the loss of him. But what was the point in wishing for something that was gone forever?
Whenever I finished a really good book, I’d hug it. I’d turn the last page and think about the story and the characters and all the places they went and all the things they saw and all the lessons they did or didn’t learn, and I would hold that book close and think that somehow they belonged to me now. All those little characters had walked into my chest and carved out a piece of my soul to call home, and they’d never leave. So that’s how I tried to look at our relationship. He belonged to me now, all of it did, the summer and the light and the wind and the love, even if he’d walked away and written our ending.
As the weather cooled down I finally picked myself up and got lost in Honesty, taking better and better photos, trying to make new contacts in the blogging world, trying to reach the widest audience possible. The distraction proved to be my savior. The misery made me work obsessively hard, weirdly enough, and soon I found that the more I worked, the less I thought about him. I hit forty thousand fans, then fifty. One day I stopped to talk to a man who looked a bit nuts, and he gave me a quote that pushed me even further into viral territory. He explained that he’d been released from prison three years before, but was still struggling to adjust to life again – in some ways, he felt like he was still locked up.
“Why?” I asked as politely as I could. “What’s stopping you from being free again?”
“Chains come in all shapes and sizes, squirt. Some of them we even make for ourselves.” He looked down at me, something unknowable in his eyes. “None of us get to choose our own paths for ourselves, anyway, not really. I came from a long line of screw-ups, and my son is likely pegged for the same fate. We never got out. That’s the thing about destiny – most of the time, the world decides it for you.”
Soon people were even sending me their own admissions, and I started using them on rainy days when I couldn’t go out and do my interviews. “I’m fat and I hate myself,” one message in my inbox read, along with a selfie of an overweight teenaged boy from the neck down. “My parents liked my little sister Marlee more than me because she was skinny and pretty, so every day, I would give her tubs of peanut butter and ice cream while they went to work. She got diagnosed with diabetes last month. I hate myself even more now.”
The post got four thousand likes, and for a few hours I felt fulfilled. Another message came from a teenaged girl who’d kissed her female neighbor and said she wasn’t ashamed about it in the slightest. “Why do we do what the world tells us to do, and shut out what the heart wants us to do?” she asked in her message, and it brought tears to my eyes – but I declined it. I still couldn’t touch the gay issue. And one day late in September, an Honesty mission that had started out in disaster – the first man I approached had whispered “fuck you!” before walking away – I got the single most beautiful quote I’d ever heard, from a woman on a Vespa with a rough-looking face telling me about her history of chasing the wrong men:
“Whoever’s reading this out there – you deserve to have someone's hands be glued to you, for their eyes to be stuck on you. You deserve for their face to catch on fire when they look at you, for them to lay eyes on you and devote the rest of their day to you. Don’t ever let yourself settle for anything less than magic from Dumbledore’s freakin’ wand. That feeling – you know, that crazy, irrational, my-brain-won’t-work-without-you, I’d-make-you-eggs-every-morning-for-the-rest-of-my-life kind of feeling – that feeling is the most important thing you will ever find. No matter what happens in this life, that feeling – that love – will keep you warm, and carry you through. So find that magic feeling and never let anything take it away from you.”
The post got eight thousand likes and was mentioned in a national newspaper. Even though it hurt to read her words, I was still so high. This was the most surprising thing, the pockets of happiness that could be found within my misery. Falling so low could kick you back up for a moment, it seemed. But those bursts only lasted until the sun went down, of course. Then I would go home, close the blinds, and feel Nicky slide into my so
ul like fog. And that boy wouldn’t leave. All this world did was kill dreams, blow out flames, burn holes in your soul. How did anyone live here?
From time to time I would log into friends’ profiles and stalk him from afar, even though it felt like emotional cutting. And he was doing well. I wanted him to crash and burn, but he wasn’t. I was watching the renaissance he was undergoing without me. The further he rose, the more it hurt, and the deeper I fell. Because sometimes breakups destroyed one person and made the other person fly. I’d wanted so badly to believe love was a thing that could exist for me out there, but I’d been a fool. That’s all I was. A fool who’d believed in lies and galaxy eyes. And now I had nothing except my stupid blog.
Nicky seemed to get rid of all the clothes I’d gotten him in Savannah, went back to gym shorts and athletic-type shirts. His hair got messier. He looked tan and gorgeous and perhaps a little more muscular, but I could not tell if he was truly happy. It could’ve gone either way, really. And soon I realized he was trying to look straight. He was going backwards, and I felt so sorry for him.
It was at that bar called the Pier where I first saw him. When our eyes pulled together from across the room, everything else fell away, time included, and it was almost the summer again. He just stared at me, biting his lip and brushing back that sun-touched hair. And then he was gone.
Before I fell asleep that night, I broke down and texted him for the first time. I think we made the biggest mistake ever, I said. I spent the best days of my life with you. Please talk to me.
I had a feeling he’d unblocked my number after seeing me, and I was right. He began typing, then stopped.
He never did send what he’d started.
One day in November I went into the office to tell my “boss” about my progress. Honesty was exploding and he wanted updates, I guess, just to make sure I was aware that he owned me. Facebook had just “verified” me with a blue check, and I supposed he just wanted to assert himself on me, as all stud ducks did. Nicky’d had me thinking about love lately, so I told my boss the story about the gay homeless woman. Being adored by Nicky, being touched by him, being loved by him, in his own little repressed way, had made me realize that being gay wasn’t such a bad, shocking, taboo thing, and I wanted to maybe post something a little different from the norm. Because after Nicky, the world seemed so much bigger now. Bigger than it ever had before, really.
“Cute, but no gay stuff,” my boss said abruptly as he stared down at the magazine he was reading, as offhandedly as if he’d told me to take out the trash in the break room. I stopped breathing.
“Gay stuff?” I asked. He looked up at me, the whir of his hard drive the only sound in the room. I noticed his rotten, decaying teeth and tried not to wince.
“Ehh, no offense to anyone, but two guys together, two girls together – I have nothing against it, it’s just not my thing. Not into it. Never have been.”
My eyes narrowed – I couldn’t believe he was talking like this. If someone were to turn up their nose at a movie poster featuring only, say, Hispanic actors and say “ehh, Hispanic people just aren’t my thing,” that person would rightfully be treated like a bigot. But why was it okay to discriminate against gays in the same way? Why was it completely accepted to write gays off, and nobody else? This was one of the last frontiers, as far as I was concerned, and nothing was being done to help. The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I became.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I don’t see what you’re saying.”
“You don’t? Gay people represent ten percent of the population, kid. It’s a niche market, not meant for the mainstream, and nobody else outside of that market cares. It’s-”
“Redheads,” I interrupted as something in me popped. And suddenly I didn’t feel so accepting anymore.
“Redheads?”
“Redheads,” I repeated, my voice rising. “Two percent of humanity has red hair, which is far less than the gay population, and so that should be a ‘niche’ thing, too, right? Wrong – you see redheads everywhere. Every other book stars an auburn-haired heroine, every other commercial features the quirky redheaded girl with freckles, every other movie has the redheaded best friend sidekick. Now you sit here and tell me why ‘gay’ deserves to be a niche market, shoved into the corner and kept separate and hidden and segregated from everything else, while ‘redhead’ is as mainstream as can be. No, seriously, tell me. I’ll wait. I’ve got time.”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. For the first time I’d ever seen, my boss was speechless.
“Kid,” he finally said. “Look. This is Northeast Florida, not Brooklyn. We’re trying to appeal to families and advertisers, not the fun little boys down at the gay bar who prance around in their little outfits and wave flags in the air. We’re covering human interest here, not furthering the gay agenda.”
“Agenda?” I asked, incredulous. “But I’m just a kid with a phone.”
“Exactly, and who do you think is changing the world today? Kids with phones. It’s scary.”
It’s not scary, I thought as I sat back and fingered my phone in my pocket. It’s a whole new world.
The next morning I woke up to a body bag. My neighbor Naomi’s partner Ruth had died in the night, and watching them cart the body away while Naomi stared blankly in the direction of the ambulance was one of the strangest and most surreal things I’d ever seen. Nicky had introduced me to a new world, even if he’d stepped away – but Ruth would never be able to live in that world now. She was dead. Nobody would ever show Ruth what it was like to not have to close off the universe from all the love in her life – she’d kept her curtains drawn until the end, and now no curly-haired person with galaxy eyes would ever open them for her. She was done.
But I wasn’t done, I thought as I made some coffee, some weird adrenaline pooling somewhere near my throat. Lately I just hadn’t been feeling so compliant anymore, and the body bag – along with my boss – had sort of kicked that into overdrive. Women like Naomi and Ruth and the lady with the PBR were being made to live and die in hiding because of people like my boss and his fear, his hatred, his ignorance, his confusion. And I knew I was part of the problem, too, because the silent ones were just as guilty as the loud ones. People thought they needed to be at the front of some Westboro Baptist Church picket line with a GOD HATES FAGS sign to be keeping the world a shitty place, but they didn’t. Everyone who stood aside silently while someone was mocked, everyone who’d ever turned their noses from the hatred and told themselves we’d moved forward – their hands were bloody, too. Maybe bloodier, because they were the ones with the power to change things. If I looked down at humanity as it existed today, I wouldn’t recognize us. Naomi’s pain deserved to felt by the world, but nobody would ever know. She needed a witness. Obviously I didn’t know her and couldn’t tell her story, I did have other pain to publish…
I thought of the Honesty story saved on my phone, the desperate masterpiece of the old woman who had loved another female and let it destroy her. More and more, I was realizing I had a responsibility. Not just as a semi-famous blogger, but as a human, a human who didn’t want to be a worthless piece of shit. I’d been noticing things lately – things I’d never noticed before. Upon glancing at the romance novel section at Target I’d noted that out of the twenty books displayed, all twenty portrayed straight couples, while only two of those couples were non-white. The state of Michigan had just passed a law making sodomy a felony, and various other states under Republican rule were also passing similarly heinous bills. The world just wasn’t improving. Every time I went to the grocery store or the movie theater and saw a little effeminate boy being dragged around by a parent who hated him, his deadened eyes trapped in his own skull like dogs in a kill shelter, I could feel every action I wasn’t doing to help, notice every hug I wasn’t offering. My lungs were starting to ache with the words I wasn’t saying, and I wanted to give those boys hope that you could be gay and happy – I wanted them to know
there was a chance that one day they might stop hating themselves enough to let a boy stare at them with galaxy eyes and make them feel put back together.
But I was doing nothing on purpose. I’d always picked my subjects and stories very carefully, desperate not to let anyone even tiptoe near the truth about me. I knew eyebrows would lift to the sky if I ever started to feature gay stories and became some mouthpiece of the gay community or something, so I’d made sure to steer clear of any of that. If someone even looked gay, I wouldn’t interview them, as gross as that sounded, and if one of my subjects did start sliding somewhere close to the gay subject, I’d rush the interview to a close and find someone else. But lately my stories and posts had been getting stale, shallow, and maybe there was a reason for that. I was disregarding my own truth. What depths could I plumb if I opened up one of the deepest wells of all? What was a blog called Honesty without a little honesty?
It was so risky, though, and not just because of the Nicky factor. I was starting to think life was all about figuring out who you were, and then deciding how much of that person to show to the world. I had so much riding on how much I revealed. I was lost, and Honesty was my only road, my only plan. It had to work out because it couldn’t not work out – success was my only option. There’d been a few articles about me in magazines here or there, calling me the wunderkind tech boy of Florida or whatever, and I had fangirls who would comment my pictures with shockingly direct come-ons about my smile or my eyes or my body, even when the post had nothing to do with me. At this point my identity was just as wrapped up in the blog as the blog itself, and I was being such a hypocrite by indirectly preaching the virtues of truth while living my life behind closed, locked doors. But the fans had this ideal of me as some hetero dreamboat, the artsy boy next door. What would I do if it all fell apart and the pigeons flew the coop, onto some straight guy onto whom they could project their sexy fantasies? I could ruin my whole life. This could torpedo it all…
