Honesty

by Seth King

  “It’s me,” I said softly. “I just came to say hi, I guess. And nobody’s watching, so don’t worry. Nobody cares. There’s nothing wrong with chandeliers, anyway…never was at all…”

  I swayed a little as I stood, and I knew I could not pretend anymore. It all felt so real now that I was here, only feet away from whatever was left of him. He was the one that got away, the one that could’ve been. So my soul burst open in the form of liquid from my tear ducts and vicious sobs from somewhere between my throat and my stomach. “Oh, God. I’m sorry I couldn’t fix you, Nicky. I’m so sorry…”

  And I was sorry. For everything. A word could hold so much in it, after all. I was sorry for this terrible world that had made us like this. I was sorry for a culture so vile it made death seem like a more attractive option than openness. But mostly I was just sorry that I had let it all keep me from loving him, that I had let it beat me. This was a level of sorry I had never experienced, though – I was soaked in it, drenched in it, and I knew I would never be able to take back my actions during the last few months of his life. Or my lack of action, to be more precise. There were so many things I could’ve done to save him, but it was over. I wanted to hope that the world going forward would be better and kinder and less sucky than the one we were leaving behind, but I couldn’t. I’d always assumed humanity would reach some sort of critical mass – that we’d figure things out and roll on with it – but yeah, no, this definitely didn’t feel like that. In this bright future, my best friend was dead because of the shame. The fear. We were trapped, suffocating, and it wasn’t getting any better. It was so freaking stupid that he’d had to die for this.

  Cruelly, an old woman was crying at her husband’s plot a few graves away, her kids next to her, and as I watched them I just thought, that right there – that’s what the world stole from me. I would never get the validation of the world knowing Nickicito had loved me. The act of grieving meant so much more when you were doing it in the center of a group of people who loved you, or had at least loved the same person as you. What did my lonesome grief mean to the world? Nothing. People had to know about this, but they never would. I had nowhere to run – I was still closeted to my friends, my mom barely wanted anything to do with my life, and my dad was, well, my dad. The world had erased ColeyAndNickyVille.

  As I stood there I tried to imagine what his funeral looked like, how his parents must’ve sounded as their boy was lowered into the Earth, but I couldn’t. And that’s when I realized I probably wouldn’t even have known about it anyway, even if I’d known his family as a “friend.” I wouldn’t be the grieving girlfriend, suffering glamorously beside the mother. And if I did come I’d be a random guy in the back, crying in the back about the love of his life while the second cousin’s stepson looked at me weirdly. Then I would’ve gotten into my car and gone home alone, as always. I was not even in Nicky’s orbit – that was probably the saddest thing. Here in this country that had supposedly fixed itself, a country that promised freedom and justice for all, Nicky’s family would never know I had loved their son. They would never know that two boys had met on a windy day on the front side of summer and opened up each other’s lives, that he brought me cinnamon rolls when he was in a good mood, that he touched my shoulder when he was nervous or said my name when he was happy. They would never know that in a future that kept sliding into the past, two kids had stared at each other in a Pontiac in August and become immortal together. But I knew. I was the only one who would ever know. And that was going to have to be enough forever.

  But still, could it have helped his parents to know about me? Nicky had hated his father, just as I hated mine, but even he was probably broken after all this. His only son was dead. Could it give them some small amount of comfort to know that in their son’s final months, he was loved? That he was held by someone who loved him, kissed by someone who adored him, slept in the same bed as someone who wanted to spend forever inside his galaxy eyes? I guess I’d never know. Neither would they. It was all one big train wreck of Not Knowing. But I did know one thing: how messed up the world was when kids were being forced to hide so deep in the shadows, their own families didn’t even know the slightest thing about them. If only parents knew the damage they were creating by ignoring the realities of their kids’ lives…

  And maybe I would sit with them in a living room sometime years away in a perfect future and tell them that I was the one. The one their son had loved, the one that had held him and comforted him in his final year. Maybe, maybe not. But it was a beautiful thing to hope for.

  I looked down at the grave it came rushing back to me: that one rare Morning Glory of a moment when he’d given himself to me, back in Savannah.

  “Shit, Coley,” he’d said in the car, and I’d looked over at him then, so happy I wanted to cry.

  “Yeah?”

  “Love me forever, okay?”

  I didn’t say anything at the time. I couldn’t. But I could now.

  I bent down and placed the eulogy I’d written for him the night before against his stone. I hadn’t spoken for him at his funeral, or even been there, so this was my makeup session. I’d never been much of a writer – the beautiful shapes and colors I saw in my mind usually fell apart whenever I tried to pull them out of my skull – but I liked what I’d come up with nonetheless.

  Here lies Nicky Flores, a boy who loved. He loved with every tool he had, in every way he know how, as hard as his broken heart would let him. He loved in a world that tried to destroy that love, and really there has never been anyone or anything braver. And as we cry for him, let us cry freely, as he is worth every tear.

  Under my own message I’d added my favorite quote, from a pop star/poet called Saviour:

  Fate is an artist, and every human body contains two souls intertwined like brushstrokes on an artist’s canvas – yours, and the soul of the person you were born to meet.

  I stood up and dried my eyes. Nobody would ever see this, but there was nothing I could do to change that. Oh, God. This was so hard.

  The weird thing was, the happy moments with him had sometimes been so rare. In the midst of all the fights and the drama and the cut-off phone calls and the ignored texts and the “breaks,” I’d almost forgotten that we were happy. But, so help me God, I had never been happier than that boy made me. He could be so gentle with me, so caring, so soft. If I could only find a way back to him. I would gladly exchange forever with someone else for five more minutes with him, and that was the worst thing, the fear that nobody would ever compare.

  “I love you,” I said to his grave, and it did not make sense that he was under and inside the dirt in front of me, wearing a shirt I’d bought him. Because people like him just didn’t die. He was just too good, too otherworldly, too majestic. I already missed him with a force so strong, it both hurt and shocked me. “And you are enough,” I said. “Forever and ever. And I’m so proud to have known you, do you hear me? The world was wrong, not you. Nothing you ever did was wrong. God, we were so close to getting to happy…”

  Lost in the blind inferno of first love, I’d never told Nicholas Flores a lot of things. I’d never really told him how much I’d loved him – more than anything I’d ever loved before, even myself. I’d never really told him it was okay to love me. I’d never really told him he wasn’t dirty or sinful or cursed to hell because of what he felt. Because the truth was, I’d never known it myself. I’d swallowed the lies of the world, too. But being allowed to drift into a love like that with him, and realizing that despite what I’d been told by my pastors and teachers and parents, the love between us was real – just as real as the love any man felt for any woman, as real as any love any soul felt for any other soul – that love had taught me the truth and cleansed me of the lies. Love was never wrong. Love was always right. But now I’d never be able to tell Nicky that.

  Now, I knew I loved Nicky for many reasons. I knew I loved him because of the way I psychotically collected useless facts about him, like how he
hated any kind of beef and how his favorite morning show was Today due to a weird little crush on Kathie Lee Gifford. I knew I loved him because I could still perfectly envision the way he smelled, like lemons and sand and the same body wash he said he’d used since middle school. I knew I loved him because of the way my eyes burned when I tried to look at him, for the way he made me feel more alive, for the way he’d loved the Kings of Leon with all of his damaged heart. But mostly I knew I loved him because for the first time in my short and difficult life, when I was next to him I felt like I could be, wholly and essentially, and without strings attached, myself. That was a comfort I would never get back.

  The world was a big place, though, full of crowds of strangers, and although starting over currently looked like the worst thing in the world to me, I knew I wasn’t too afraid to look for more love, eventually at least. I guess you needed a near-death experience to bring you back to life. And I was alive. Barely.

  Then I opened his breakup letter from all those months ago, when he’d spent a set of perfect days in Savannah with me and then gotten scared and dumped me. Why he’d never given it to me, I guess I’d never know – I was still so proud to have spent the best days of my life with him, though. The letter felt a little weird and unsettling to hold, like it was a message from a ghost or something, because that’s kind of what it was. It went like this:

  Coley,

  It’s funny, because as I write this letter, knowing that we’re over and everything, I’m not crying. Well, I am a little bit, because I’m effing crazy, but I’m also smiling. Because I know we tried. You made me grow up, kid. I had no idea how to love anyone before you. Just think back: think of the kids we were when we met. Think of how closed we were to the world, how frozen we were, how scared shitless of each other we were. Think of how I watched people attack you and then laughed with them. We are different people now, and that is victory. Almost. Kind of. We both know it’s not enough. But whatever happens, never confuse willfully leaving someone with simply being too weak to love them in the way they deserve. I’m still not strong enough to be alive and alone, without you. That’s why I had to disappear.

  And I lost it.

  But that’s not the story I’m writing today. You’ll always be with me, no matter what I do. I am writing about the future, I think.

  The following paragraph had been smudged and crossed out, after which he’d started again. He’d cried on it too much, I guessed. I sort of cleared my throat in a way that sounded weird and flimsy and kept reading:

  So, yeah, instead of thinking about what we lost, let’s think about what we could’ve had, in the most perfect of worlds. This isn’t a regular breakup letter. Because you’re my always, and I want you to imagine this:

  It’s me and you, just us. We’re walking down the street, not hiding, just walking. The world is clean and bright and nobody is staring. We don’t have to look over our shoulders, we don’t have to walk five feet away from each other, we don’t have to lie to our own families. We get pralines. I bend down on one knee and ask you to move in with me into that brick-walled hipster apartment you talked about, and nobody gawks, nobody judges, nobody points. They just clap for us.

  Imagine this place, Coley Furman. No matter what, let’s make sure it becomes real. You have no idea how badly I wanted to, and always did. And when we do, we will rob that world of love. I promise.

  Another smudge. Another crossed-out sentence. My tears were falling on the page, too, mixing ink with saltwater. And then the thought struck me: what if I never loved again?

  So: I am going to love you forever, regardless of whether I am ever strong enough to love you out loud or not. What would you say if I did ask you all this, once we built this perfect world, or it built itself? Would you take me as your real, actual, official boyfriend, once the wreckage and the bullshit cleared? Or at least just live in a brick-walled hipster apartment with me until you got sick of me and moved out?

  Write back soon. I’ll be waiting. -Nicky

  PS – here’s the thing I was never able to say in person, for a million reasons and one: I love you, Coley. Someday I hope we can both be free.

  I folded up the paper as I cried, but I didn’t have to say anything. He knew my answer. Nicky already knew. He belonged to the skies now, and now he was free. And now the lights would take him home.

  Time fell away like a set of dominoes again, and then I was back with him on the last night we’d ever spent together. “There’s nothing wrong with chandeliers,” I’d whispered to him as he’d slipped into his second-to-last sleep. And as I stood there I said a little prayer that wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he’d heard me, and he believed me. Most of all I just wished he knew I didn’t blame him for this. What I wouldn’t give to hold that poor kid in my arms for just five more minutes and tell him he was loved, he was accepted, he was good and pure and right…

  “Hey, kid,” a guy with a cleaning crew or something called to me from beyond the willows. “We’re closing for maintenance. If you’re not waiting on family or anything, try to get outta here pretty soon.”

  “Fine,” I said. “And hey, are there any chandeliers in the funeral home?”

  “Huh?”

  “Just, yes or no?”

  “Um, sure – a few, I think.”

  I reached into my pocket and left a ten-dollar bill on Nicky’s grave. “Clean them, will you? Make sure they shine.”

  The guy shrugged and nodded and kept working, and I gulped. The family at the next grave turned to leave, and I knew what this meant. I had nobody to wait for, nobody to hide from, and Nicky and I were together, alone, for the first time in four months, and possibly the last time. The world couldn’t touch us here. We had nothing to run from. It was just the combined energy of us.

  I sort of awkwardly knelt at Nicky’s grave, my martyr, lost to the ancient and championless and embarrassing and stupid fight against prejudice. He’d been born into a new world ruled by old gods that just wouldn’t accept him, but I did. I hoped he knew it somewhere. Brought to my knees in so many more ways than one, I placed a kiss on the stone, cold and hard, and thought of how nobody would ever know our story. Our love would, quite literally, go to the grave with him. It already had. He was dead, and our relationship was gone, and we had never really told a soul about it. How strange it was, the lengths humans would go to when running from fear. How strange and how awful. More than anything I had ever wished in my life, I suddenly wished I could’ve been more important to him than the fear that’d taken him out.

  I knew I would eventually have to deal with the fact that he perhaps chose to leave me, that he perhaps chose to die instead of face all this. And maybe I could’ve saved him. Maybe I could’ve tried harder, or then again, maybe my quest to change him had been fruitless from the start. Maybe you couldn’t stop people from being who they were born to be any more than you could reach up and grab the whistling wind. Maybe humans were set in stone, and all you could do was point them in the right direction and pray they didn’t fall out of the sky. Nicky had perhaps been born to be weak, born to fall, but still I’d love that kid forever.

  I blinked. I wanted to swear to myself that I would Promise To Be My Best Self and Start Over and Leave No Sunset Unwatched and Grab Every Chance I Got and all those other things people promised themselves after events like this, but the truth was that I couldn’t. Living was so hard. I didn’t know where my life would end up more than anyone else did. All of those sayings and promises suddenly seemed kind of empty and dumb, anyway. This wasn’t going to save me, it was just wrecking me, and how many people got ruined and came back stronger? My life now had a Nicky-shaped hole in it, and it would now be measure in two units – before Nicky, and after him. For the rest of my days, I would walk around with his bright sadness inside me – on and off, I would wake up and see that same Facebook status in my mind again, fall into that same hole, crash into that same wall. How did adults live like this, anyway, go around with all this accumulat
ed horror and tragedy and hurt within themselves? How did anyone withstand growing up? All I could do, I figured, was my best, with what I still had, and try not to dwell on what had been taken away from me. Hope that what I’d learned in the past would shade my future in some way, and that all of this mess hadn’t just been a shot in the dark…

  So I took out my pen and wrote a letter to nobody.

  I’m nineteen and I like guys. That fact has defined and upended my whole life, and only today am I able to say it out loud without totally hating myself. But it’s too late. I lost the only person my heart has ever wanted, and it’s all my fault. So don’t be like me. Don’t settle for the fear. Choose the hard thing. Choose the love. Always.

  Go redo your life. Redecorate your whole ecosystem. Create a world inside your head that is exactly as colorful as you want it to be, and then make it real. Now. While you still can.

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I turned the camera on myself and snapped a photo. Then I took the Polaroid selfie and placed it under the one of the chandelier that Nicky had never accepted, along with that photo of him from the first day. I added some mementos I’d brought from home – a shard of pottery we’d found on a walk deep in the woods, a ticket stub from a late movie, a wristband from the fair on a Sunday night – the remains of a love affair carried out in total darkness. Then I put it all in front of Nicky’s stone, careful not to step on his patch of dirt. This would never make it to my blog, or the Internet. Nicky deserved this particular bit of truth – the world didn’t. Our story had been a secret, for worse and better. We’d met in the shadows and bloomed in the dark. But now he was mine, and I would safeguard him for eternity.