by Seth King
It became the year of getting to know the soul inside my skin
And realizing that nobody’s love was going to save me
But my own
THE END OF US
It was the last weekend of the summer. There was gold in the sky and wind in the air when you sat down with tears in your eyes and dumped me. You said you hated yourself for what you felt for me, you said you wanted to change your life and get into heaven. For four months or so, you were my heaven. Whether you found that place or not, I hope you know you were the brightest part of my life, the part I held above all others. I hope you know you weren’t dirty or wrong or unlovable for loving me and being different. I hope you know I didn’t hate you even when I said I did. Mostly I just hope you’re at peace. Remember when we got drunk in that messy hotel room and blurted out that we loved each other for the first time? Remember when your grandma died and you came over and sat on my bed and asked me to hold you? Remember driving in your car down the beach, running away from a world that had it out for us? Remember the slate-blue Atlantic and the way the waves sparkled just for us, the evening winds that smelled like palms and suntan lotion and sand and bougainvillea, that canary-yellow shirt of mine that you kept in your room? I will hold those memories with me forever, even after we fade to black and white.
I sat back with misty eyes and thought about what I’d written, and what I was about to do. Part of me couldn’t believe myself, but another part was exhilarated beyond anything I’d ever known. Maybe I’d lost my mind, and maybe my sanity had officially left the building. But at least I was free.
I was so proud of myself, too. For some reason I saw a vision of my bigoted old childhood preacher, Mr. DeShane, coming across the letter, his eyes growing wide with disgust and fury as he read. What would he think of this, I wondered? And then I smiled, because as far as I was concerned, Mr. DeShane – and everything he stood for – could suck my sweaty left testicle. I was so stupid to ever think the world couldn’t be changed. All you had to do was be brave enough to light the first match. I’d found my lighter, and now I was about to attack the world and fight until it started listening. And who knew: maybe somewhere, Nicky would be prouder of me than my father had been.
I turned off the highway to my hometown at sunset. The sky was the strangest shade of burnished pink, a bubblegum tangerine. I took the long way back just to avoid a certain street where I’d always golf carted with Nicky – for some reason it still felt too hard for me to face that particular stretch of pavement where I’d run wild with him. Part of the majesty of youth, I was starting to learn, was the complete ignorance of it; the cluelessness built into being young and free and sick with the dreamer’s disease. Sitting in a parking lot on a hot, windy night drinking gas station wine with Nicky and listening to bad pop music from his golf cart’s speakers was not an inherently magical experience until I looked back and realized I’d never be able to do it again. That was all I knew at the time, so I didn’t really stop to think about it – tomorrow didn’t matter. By the time you realized moments for what they were, they were already gone. Only after you grew older and looked at memories you could never get back could you realize just how valuable those cheap nights were, and learn you were inside a messy miracle called being alive.
I got stuck behind a city bus in a clogged construction zone, and soon I realized I was right in front of my old FitTrax gym, ground zero of ColeyAndNickyVille. I smiled a little. “Hey,” Nicky had called the very first day we’d ever spoken, looking bright and fresh and new as a summer sunrise. “You in the business of staring, or do you do it for free?” I could still hear his voice perfectly in my mind. It made me so sad, and so, so happy.
Across the road I spotted a giant truck pouring greyish concrete into the foundation of a new townhouse, and I got curious. Soon a family would be moving there, mom and dad and little kids, hopefully more whole than mine had been. I got to thinking about this fantastical family of the future. They would never know about me or Nicky or the little world we’d shared, but they would probably know people like us, people who were different. What would they think of those people? And what would that family be like? How would the parents raise their children? What would they teach them? What would those kids’ ideals be? Would they grow up to hate themselves like me, or be in love with everything they did? Would they be trapped like I was, or would they be brave and free like how America was supposed to be? I didn’t know, but I hoped they would be better humans than had existed yesterday, and inherit less bullshit than I had. The world was just going to keep happening no matter how shitty my life became, and I was stuck with me – I had no other choice but to learn how to inhabit this body I’d been given, try to use it to help the rest of us. And as the liquid concrete glooped out of the tube, laying the foundation for tomorrow, I imagined a world with no heaven to aspire to, no hell to avoid. No guilt, no goals. Just love, and all it encompassed. Life could be so beautiful, after all, if you let it be.
So I grabbed my phone again and sent my mother one simple message: I love you, mom. Because I did love her, despite everything she was, and everything she wasn’t. And suddenly I wanted so badly to give her all the hugs and kisses and love I’d never been able to give Nicky. All I knew how to do going forward was love people with all the love in me for as long as I could, and hope that when they left this place they’d been filled up with love by me, and would be taking more love with them than they’d come in with. It was kind of cool, actually – I was just a tiny little person living in northern Florida who could contribute to humanity’s global pool of love. How awesome was that? After all, humans were just small, breakable mammals on a largely unspectacular planet in a thoroughly average solar system located in one unimpressive galaxy out of trillions, who were meant to love each other. That’s all we were. The rest of it was so useless. All we could do was love…
As I idled, one of the construction dudes caught my eye as he built a new future. I sensed that he was gay, but he wasn’t the tutu-wearing spectacle of my childhood nightmares about what my future held, either. I’d been so judgmental my whole life, so quick to assume “gay” meant one thing, when really it meant a million different things, or nothing at all, really. The butt of the joke had been me all along. This construction guy had latte-colored skin and a big, sweet-natured smile as bright as stadium lights, and he couldn’t have been much older than I was. His eyes weren’t galaxies, but then again, nobody else’s would be ever again. It would always be Nicky – in a million neighborhoods, under a million suns, in a million different lives, it would always be him. But then again, here was a new boy, and he was looking at me. Being honest with society was one thing, but could I be honest with myself? You didn’t get to decide what the world thought about you, but you did get to decide how you thought about the world, and this construction dude wasn’t thinking at all. He was just being. And the fact that he was black, and that my father would have a dozen heart attacks if I ever ended up dating him…well, that just made me like him more, honestly.
Another big happy smile shattered his face, and suddenly all the months melted away and I was back in the body of that shy, skittish kid who’d fallen in love with Nicky last summer at the very gym in front of me, terrified of his own gay shadow. Create your world, I heard someone say in Nicky’s voice deep in my mind. Something cracked open in me, then lit itself on fire, throwing sparks into the darkest parts of me, and I knew I was a boy remade. Every molecule in me buzzed and burned, and suddenly I knew I’d been put on this Earth to live this truth, tell this story, speak this honesty. In that moment a drifting kid, forever lost, took on his destiny and became, for the first time, proud of himself. We were all born for battle into a cruel, shitty world intent on blowing out the fires in our eyes, but the moment we let that world harden us and close up our chests and destroy our ability to love – that was the moment the world won the war. And since I had no intentions of losing just yet, I did the second-craziest thing I had ever done in my nin
eteen years and eleven months of being alive: I pulled off the road and parked my car.
I rolled down my window and leaned into the light. I said one true sentence in a shaking voice, thirteen words long. The boy gave me a startled look, dropped what he was holding, and walked toward me.
THE END
A SPECIAL NOTE FROM SETH KING
On a clear, cold afternoon when I was thirteen, I walked to the top of a mountain and thought about jumping off of it. I was being mistreated by someone very close to me for having “feminine qualities,” and so I slipped out of the cabin my family had rented for Christmas, tiptoed to the edge of a cliff, and peered down at the jagged rocks and swaying trees below. I was in love with a golden-eyed boy from my science class and part of me wanted to die for that love, because he couldn’t admit he loved me back and I knew it would never work out and the world was built against us. What stopped me was imagining a new world where it wouldn’t matter who I dreamed about, where I wouldn’t be insulted or belittled for being different, where a boy could love me back and not have to run from it. I didn’t want a future where I could scream from the hilltops about my love – that wasn’t really my style – I just wanted a world where the news about me would be met with a shrug. What kept me on firm ground was envisioning that place.
Today is December 22, 2015, and I’m back. Back in this town that almost served as the end of me, back in this same struggle I faced a decade ago, but hopefully not for much longer. I lost the love of the boy with the golden eyes, or maybe I never had it all – but still it changed me forever. I had to watch from the sidelines as he flourished and became a famous athlete, but I think I’m finally becoming myself, too. I’ve loved women and men since then, and I’ve felt them love me back. All of it has gone into the story of who I am today. I have known I had to write this book ever since that day on the mountaintop, and when I knew I couldn’t run from Coley and Nicky anymore, I sat down and took a breath. Honesty drifted out of me like an orphan that had looked for a home all its life, flowed out of my fingertips like small galaxies. I am so proud of this book.
At the same time, I’m not stupid. The world is so different now, but much the same. We are closer to the utopia I imagined in some ways, miles away in others. Technically speaking I am one the most prominent young male authors in the country, and the news that my first love was a guy could change everything. I am famous for writing books about men who fall in love with women – which is just as much a part of my past as this book is, to be fair – and I operate in an industry where heterosexual love stories count for over ninety percent of sales. I know I am a canvas which a lot of my readers splash their expectations onto, and I know I have female fans who probably want me to write the same hetero love story ad infinitum. I will be the first to admit that a novel about two male teenagers falling in love one bright, brutal summer might not be what they’re looking for from me. I know who it is for, though. It’s for all the little kids like Coley and Nicky and me, all the kids who have ever been told by classmates and parents and society that they are dirty and inadequate and tainted, all the kids who have ever climbed something and thought about jumping out of hell. More than that, though, it’s for the ones who did jump. It’s for the lost ones, forever silent, that I remained after. I can still try to be brave enough to change this world I live in – they can’t. So as I sail into a new world alone I do it with the wish to both speak for the ones who left before me and improve things for the ones who stand on the edge today, uncertain if the future is something they even want to see. So help me walk them back. We’ve done so much, but we still have so much more to accomplish. In this gleaming new future we think we’ve created, people are suffering everywhere. Nobody else needs to die for this, especially children. According to the Educational Researcher, forty-four percent of bisexual teens are seriously considering suicide, and that is a statistic our society should not accept in 2016.
This is Honesty, my declaration of independence. I was born to write this book. I know it could derail everything, but if one attempt to help humanity ends my career and puts me in the poor house, save a street corner for me. Kids like me are still killing themselves every day, and with visibility comes responsibility. I am committed to writing about subjects that may help some folks out there, and not just pacify my fans and maybe buy me a yacht. History tells me I am naïve to expect this to not be an issue. I dare you to prove me wrong.
To my family: I love you. To my brother’s kids: I live for you, and I hope you’ll grow up one day and understand this and be proud of me. To everyone else who has ever supported me so far: thanks. And to the boy with the golden eyes: thank you for showing me what love felt like. I won’t forget the way we laughed when we stole those oranges from your neighbor’s tree, the way you cried when you crashed my dirt bike, the way your leg felt next to mine when we fell asleep on my trampoline under a blanket of stars that just weren’t in our favor. Even that morning when I indirectly asked you to admit that you loved me and your eyes filled with tears and you walked away and said you were late for church – every moment of that year we spent together will stay alive in me forever. Even though our story is over and you haven’t spoken to me in years, even though those two kids who existed on that trampoline are long gone, you’re with me still. You are engraved in me, and I carry you with me everywhere. I even wrote a book about what could’ve happened if the world had let us love each other. Here it is.
As I write this note and finish this book and close this chapter of my life, I do it looking out of my window at the exact cliff I peered over as a kid, with wind whistling in my ears and dread settling into my stomach and all the fear in the world pulling down at my young bones. Something new is ringing all around me, though. It sounds like freedom.
Seth King
Beech Mountain, NC
December 22, 2015
Seth King is the twenty-six-year-old author of The Summer Remains. He lives in Florida.
