Honesty

by Seth King

  At the last minute I changed my mind and grabbed the chandelier Polaroid, though. An idea had just come to me, and that particular Polaroid was now reserved for the cover of a book. A book called Honesty.

  I looked at the bleeding sky. It was starting to rain – nothing major, just a fine, swirling mist that covered everything around – and I had to leave. I wiped my nose and smiled a little. I missed him so much already. “I’m gonna love you with the lights on now, Nicky. No more hiding.” I stopped to choke on my own spit. Then I smiled a little. “I promise. Remember ColeyAndNickyVille? Remember laying in your bed and just being with each other like we were the first people we’d ever been with in our lives? Remember those mornings when I’d try to make turkey omelets and then burn them and drive us to McDonald’s instead? I’ll keep that world alive forever. I’ll come back to your grave sometime, too. I promise. Bye, Nicky. I’m gonna be so brave for you, just watch.” I swallowed. “And if humans go anywhere after this life, I’ll do everything I can to meet you again one day, back in ColeyAndNickyVille. So…I guess that’s it. I love you beyond reason.”

  I stuffed his note and the envelope back in my pocket, but a glimmer hijacked my eyes. That’s when I noticed the ring, my grandpa’s heirloom ring, tumbling onto Nicky’s dirt. I got confused for a minute, and then I bent down and stared at it and realized what had happened. Nicky had stolen it and taken it with him, back at the hotel in Savannah. I couldn’t believe it. All this time I thought he’d spent all those months hating me, and yet Nicky had kept my wedding ring. It was funny, the things people kept where they thought no one could see…

  I just picked it up and set it on his grave, though. He could have it. It was already his, if you asked me. Gay marriage in the United States of America, land of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, was still a technicality at best. Judges all over the nation were still fighting over its legality, county clerks were still denying marriage licenses to gay couples, churches were still denying baptisms to children of gay unions. Nicky had never lived to see the day he’d be fully, totally accepted by this great country’s law book. But here in a cemetery in Georgia, I gave him my ring, my word, my promise, and that was as good as gold. I knew time was going to change me, but the Me he’d known – the Me that was making this promise right now – would be Nicky’s forever.

  I stood back and smiled at what I’d left behind. I guess it did give me some comfort to know that Nicky had died in his way, on his own terms, in his own style. It was so like him to exit the world just as he’d lived in it: as a giant question mark. He just wasn’t going to live under someone else’s terms, and that’s all there was to it.

  In any event, my boy had died free. By God, Nicky Flores had died free.

  I left the cemetery with this visceral feeling knocking around in my bones, this thrilling/terrifying/electrifying thing that told me Nicky was dead and I was not and I could still start again and therefore anything in the universe was possible now. I wasn’t growing up, but I was growing somewhere. I didn’t really mind, anyway, because I was forming a theory that adulthood wasn’t real. First you thought you knew everything. Then you discovered you knew nothing. Then you learned that knowing nothing was okay. Then you started over from there.

  I guessed I was somewhere a few inches into the “starting over” stage. I didn’t really know what my specific future contained – I was confused and I was damaged and I was smart and I was hopeful and I was still trying and I was getting there and I never again wanted to love anyone like I’d loved Nicky Flores. That kind of love, that big grand violent malignant chandelier love that made you go insane and made you stalk social media for hours in the privacy of your bedroom and made you spin apart and then stand up and grow again, felt like it was uniquely his, like he’d stamped himself onto my heart that summer, and that spot was his forever now, even if he was nowhere. I would honor that, or at least try to. I would give him his rightful territory, keep it golden, treasure him like the crystal chandelier he was. I’d just have to rebuild in a different direction.

  I didn’t really know what being a human meant, either, obviously. I was still such a kid in so many ways. I didn’t know how exactly to grow up and become an adult who paid his taxes and had a mortgage every month, or what any of that even entailed. I didn’t know why I’d been put on a rock spinning in space to be gay and feel something different than ninety percent of other humans felt. But for the first time I was sort of, almost, okay with that. I was probably never going to wake up one day and suddenly be an adult – adulting was a journey, not a destination. But I figured loving other humans on my way to finding out the answers to all those things couldn’t hurt. Love was never a mistake, regardless of what my Sunday school teachers had told me. To love was the most grown up thing of all. All I knew for sure was that I would try to search for more beautiful sunsety moments and try to live inside more confused, breathless instances where someone I loved looked down at my shirt and took a pause and realized they loved me back. I would try to find more lovely little conversations where a stranger’s eyes clouded over and they realized they could not be anything other than honest with me, and I would try to one day fall in love with myself the way I fell in love with strangers on the street. I didn’t know if any of this was feasible, or even possible. But I did know I would try.

  When I passed the graveyard’s sad little business office, I was reminded that business was a death that people profited from, and one day my departure would fill the coffers of a similarly pathetic place of rest, too. This disgusted me in a weird and indescribable way, but I shrugged. I’d be too dead to notice, anyway. Then I saw the UPS guy stuffing a package into the office’s brick mailbox, and I remarked to myself how strange it was that all UPS guys looked the same, balding and frazzled and like their eyes were elsewhere. And I thought about how kind of beautiful it was that everyone had a place in this world, even my cleaning lady, even the president, even this UPS guy who was doing his job and carrying out his purpose in the world, dutifully and reluctantly. I hadn’t really found my place yet, but I still had a place, and that was kind of gorgeous and comforting to think about, that one day I would possibly learn to be the hell out of myself. I’d thought my place was by Nicky’s side, but clearly not. I’d just keep looking until I found somewhere I fit.

  Once again he was like my favorite book: it infuriated me that I couldn’t go back to the beginning of us and read him again, meet him with brand new eyes, just so I could live inside every second all over again. Because magic wore off: that was the nature of the magical. It was love’s job to strike us like lightning and light us up for one blazing extraterrestrial moment before retreating again and reminding us that we were mortal creatures living on an unspectacular planet. Love was a blessing from the skies, and as soon as we took that for granted, poof – love was gone. But I could, and would, write new stories, look for more magic. In any case, that explosion of passion – that moment when someone’s face lit up, when their voices shook, when their eyes took on that manic energy that came from somewhere deep, where they held their holiest truths – that’s where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. No more sleepwalking – I was going to wake up. Because so many adults were sleeping, frozen, dying, already gone. We told ourselves it was too hard to experience life for the beautiful and unpredictable and frequently damaging sunburst that it was, and we retreated into the shadows of ourselves. Soon we got cold, turned ourselves off to numb the pain of being alive. But I never wanted that for myself. I wanted to look at the forest and see the trees, I wanted to wake up in the morning and look at the day as something to chase instead of something to hide from. Tomorrow was never promised, regret was terrible and easy to avoid, and love was the mother of everything under the sun. That’s what I thought, at least.

  I hit the interstate smiling through salty tears. I hated the world, even though I kind of loved it, too. All I wanted was what everyone else wanted, which was to love and feel loved in return – and
the world wouldn’t let me have that. They’d stamped it out like a smoker putting out a cigarette on a smoke break. I would never get over this, not just for what it was, but what it could’ve been. My soul had been split in half and would always exist in two places: within me, and with him. Wherever he was. In any case, here it was, in the final frame: the resurrection of Coley Furman. Alive and dead, all at once. Torn open. Afraid, but strong enough to limp forward now. Oh, God. Hopefully…

  As I drove, I couldn’t stop picturing his grave, and the sense of enraged uselessness around it. This shit had to end. A healthy, strong, smart boy was dead, all due to stupid outdated views shoved down society’s throats by people who’d supposedly been cleansed by holy water. He was a chandelier in a world of boulders, and he just couldn’t survive his own delicacy. I never wanted anyone else to have to feel like this again. They didn’t deserve it. Donald Trump didn’t even deserve this. People were literally fighting for their lives out there, and maybe getting my story out there could help change minds and prevent this shit-storm of a situation from replicating itself. After all, I’d lived this story, breathed it, fallen to pieces at the hands of it. Maybe now it needed to be told, and I had every right to tell it. Maybe I could put our story into the book, as some vague type of author’s note or something. Hadn’t I just been lamenting the lack of gay-themed stories out there? Lots of people would kill to have the platform I had, to be listened to in the way I knew I could make people listen to the blog. I shivered a bit, already getting excited. Who knew – maybe I’d been born for this. Maybe this story was my opus. Maybe I’d been put through the ringer to learn these lessons and push this knowledge forward. Maybe this was just the sunrise of my life…

  This wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned for myself, but suddenly I was so beyond caring. At some point you just had to drop the charade and step into the person you were. Eventually you had to let go of the person you’d never become and accept your life for what it had had never been. Things were going to blow, and you just had to let the shrapnel hit where it was going to, let the casualties fall where they were going to fall. I couldn’t be normal if I tried – that just wasn’t an option for me – so why was I still chasing a life behind picket fences? People always said “it gets better” – nothing had gotten any better, but I was getting better at dealing with it, and I figured that was a start in the right direction. I knew a potential “coming out” moment would probably embarrass my family, my cousins, my friends – for nonsense reasons rooted in fear and prejudice, but still, the end effect would be the same. I didn’t really care much anymore, though, because for the first time in my life I knew I’d found something I believed in – and that confidence would have to carry me through whatever was about to happen.

  There were also other issues, now that I thought about it. I wasn’t sure if the gay community needed another gay tragedy, another miserable story about a closet case dying in shame. But then again, our story was so much more complicated and more beautiful than that. There was so much love to be found between the miserable spots. Nicky had been coaxed out of the closet by a world that had flashed acceptance and progress like a shiny lie, then forced back into it after he’d realized it was just the same old world with a glitzy new bow on top. The old world was still underneath, poisoned by the same ugliness. We were all the same in the end, just a bunch of hurt creatures with small galaxies of horror revolving within ourselves that we were too scared to let out. And maybe I could do the brave thing and let it all out…

  But it was my book, after all, and I could probably do whatever the hell I wanted with it, within reason. I needed a place to put all my rage and fury and grief and despair, and that could be the perfect outlet. What better gift to offer to the world than my pain? Perhaps I’d been born to sing this song, the song of Nicky Flores, and now that he’d taught me how to sing, well…

  I knew it wouldn’t be easy. The world at large would hijack my story, anyway, rendering it simply “another gay story,” glossing over every moment every hug every kiss every tear every triumph every chandelier and paint it as a big gay joke, just like they did with every other story not occurring between two humans of opposite sex. But screw that, and screw them. I wasn’t responsible for the world, but I was responsible for all the people under me, all the people to come after me, all the people I could possibly lend a hand to. Maybe I could use the story of NickyAndColeyVille to do that. Our love may have existed inside a snow globe, now and forever, isolated and pristine and shut off from the rest of the world by our collective fear and shame and self-doubt, but I could still shake us up and let the memories fall on my shoulders and cover me like snow. Because snow turned to water, and water cleansed you, purified you, baptized you, remade you…

  I also knew from photography that the best photos were taken from the places that were hardest to get to. Climbing a tree or wading out to a sand bar or forcing yourself up a steep sand dune was shitty, yes, but the vantage points you reached after all the difficulty gave you a whole new viewpoint, a whole new perspective. All you had to do was get there. And – so help me God – I wanted to get there.

  So I grabbed my phone and found the number, area code 212. The office manager answered, already sounding annoyed and impatient.

  “Kate Griscom, please,” I said. “I’m…her client, I guess, technically.”

  “Are you, or aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, sitting taller. “Yes. I am Kate Griscom’s client.”

  She sighed and patched me through. After what felt like twenty minutes, my agent finally answered.

  “Kate, hey, yes, it’s Cole Furman with Honesty. I’m just calling because I…well, I was lying when I said I didn’t know what to focus on. With the book, I mean.”

  “I’m listening.”

  As I got closer to Jacksonville I told her the basics of my story, my treatment down here, my pain. Then I told her I’d like to include some LGBT stories, stories that could potentially open some eyes and start changing things. When I finished she took a long breath.

  “First of all, I’m sorry,” she said. “That is…awful. Jesus, that’s just terrible. And second, I’m not surprised. I went to college in Dallas for two years. Some of the things I saw and heard there…it was just beyond belief. One of my roommates Eileen was a lesbian, and although most people were nice enough, she was absolutely miserable sometimes – she’s probably still licking her wounds. The things they did to her, I swear…” She paused. I screwed up my face, trying not to think about Nicky. “I must tell you,” she said soon. “The gay angle…in the Deep South…it’s certainly…intriguing. I don’t even know if that’s even been done before yet, in a book at least. It would definitely get people talking.”

  “Well that’s the thing,” I said, swallowing hard. “It would burn up my life, to be honest. And I just don’t want…I don’t know if I want to make a splash, or cause any trouble or anything…”

  “Uh, Cole, I hate to tell you this, but the trouble is already there.” I thought I heard her laugh a little. “Hell, this nightmare of a country could use a little disrupting, anyway. You’re really good at this whole communicating thing, so put that skill to use. Put yourself on the line – make them feel your heart.”

  I gripped the wheel. Somehow it made me feel so much stronger to know the world still contained good, kind, open-minded people somewhere. “So…you’re saying I should fight it?”

  She inhaled, paused. “To the death, Mr. Furman.”

  So as I drove I wrote my own Honesty entry into my phone, the official start of work on my book. I began by writing one true statement and then going from there. The sad thing was, I really wanted to portray Nicky as this knight on a horse, some romantic hero who’d swooped in and rescued me – but I couldn’t. Looking back, it almost seemed like I’d forced some ideal of perfection onto his shoulders that he had not only never asked for, but probably didn’t even deserve. I’d probably been dating the person I wanted him to be, instead of
the actual person that lived inside his skin. He was weak, and the crazy thing was, that’s why he was so magnificent.

  So I wrote and wrote and wrote. I’d already been writing this out in my head, actually, for reasons unknown, so as soon as I put my fingers to the keyboard, things just started flowing out:

  THE YEAR OF US

  It was the year of abandoning comfort zones

  And throwing myself at the world

  And seeing what stuck

  It was the year of spotting a pair of galaxy eyes

  And being swallowed up in them

  At light speed

  It was the year of finding myself on an overgrown sidewalk at the golden hour

  With the boy of my purest dreams

  And realizing I didn’t know my own life anymore

  It was the year of hung-up phone calls, unreturned text messages, fights in my backyard

  It was the year of cinnamon buns and Sunday morning cuddles and being loved like crown jewels in between the car crashes

  It was the year of hating him in bright red

  And feeling his passion in neon green

  And loving him in burnished gold

  It was the year of rushing through the summer air on a golf cart, getting to be a kid again

  It was the year of growing up alone in the winter cold

  It was the year of laughing in sand dunes

  And screaming in deserted kitchens

  And crying in my bed alone

  It was the year of tumbling into blackness

  And somehow finding a pulse on the other side

  It was the year of looking into the wreckage in me and finding something worth excavating

  It was the year of him.

  Until it wasn’t

  And in the final frame