More Than This

by Patrick Ness

He stops. The memory is a dangerous one. He can feel himself teetering again, an abyss of confusion and despair looking right back up at him, threatening to swallow him if he so much as glances at it.

He steps away from them. There is something alien in the way they look. Something wrong. Something invasive.

Seth feels his chest tighten with a sadness that threatens to rush in like the waves that drowned him. It had been amazing. But it was gone. And was gone even before he died.

But, he thinks, it’s possible to die before you die.

“But imagine there’s this thing that always sits there in the room with you. And everyone knows it’s there and no one will ever say a single goddamn word about it until it becomes like an extra person living in your house that you have to make room for. And if you bring it up, they pretend they don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The ache of it. The ache of missing Gudmund is so great he can barely stand it. Of missing how safe being with him felt, how easy it was, how funny and relaxed. Of missing the physical stuff, of course, but more than that, the intimacy, the closeness. Of missing just being held like that, cared for. Maybe loved.

And waking feels like death, like a death worse than drowning.

Worse, it had been accompanied by an equally hard lifelong yearning, a feeling that there had to be more, more than just all this weight. Because if there wasn’t, what was the point?

A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.

There is so much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter. So much more that he’ll never see. So much more that he’ll never get to. So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that it’s forever beyond his reach.

The loneliness. In his accumulating exhaustion, the terrible loneliness of this place swamps him, just like the waves he drowned in.

“This isn’t our whole lives. It isn’t even close. It’s high school, Sethy. It’s not meant to last forever. For a goddamn good reason.”

But I can take it if I know you’re out there, surviving, getting through it. This won’t be forever. There’s a future. There really is. We’ll find a way, Seth. Seth?”

“There’s more than this, Sethy,” Gudmund said. “This sucks beyond belief, but there’s more. We just have to get there.”

And as Gudmund disappeared behind another slamming door, Seth felt his own doors closing. The doors of the present, shutting all around him, locking him inside. Forever.

(He fought; despite everything, he was fighting –)

“People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”

“There’s always beauty,” Seth murmurs. “If you know where to look.”

“wherever you are, it’s okay. You can come back from it. Whatever happened to you down there, whatever the world looks like now, that’s not how it always looks. That’s not how it’s always going to look. There’s more. There’s always more. Whatever you see, wherever you are, we’re still here with you.

English, a language that both leapt forward into wide-open spaces and then looped back to cramp itself up.

with enough time you could get used to anything.”

Haven’t you ever felt like there has to be more? Like there’s more out there somewhere, just beyond your grasp, if you could only get to it .

Well, there’s always more than this. There’s always something you don’t know.

“And this world? This stupid, empty world? I don’t care if it’s hell. I don’t even care. If it’s real or not real, if we’ve all woken up from some online thing or if this is all your stupid imagination, Seth, I don’t care. All I know is that I’m real enough. And Tommy’s real enough. And however much of a hell this is . . .” She suddenly quiets, as if the energy’s been leached from her. “However awful it is, it’s better than there.”

“if there is more to this story than you thought, maybe there is more to that one, too. Maybe there is always more.”

Seth makes an exasperated sound. “Well, don’t take any unnecessary risks.” “I think we are in a place where all risks are necessary,” Tomasz says, and takes off running.

But then again, unlikely didn’t always mean impossible –

He hears them and his heart hurts a little. But he pushes on it and realizes it’s not a bad hurt. Not bad at all.

I can’t be anyone’s everything, Gudmund had said on that last night. Not even yours, Seth. That was Gudmund’s biggest fault. That he couldn’t be anyone’s everything. But that he’d try anyway.

The worst thing was finding out he was never really all mine in the first place. And so, for a moment, for a terrible, unbelievably shitty afternoon in a shitty little town on the shitty, freezing coast of Washington, I had nothing. There wasn’t anything more, and the one good thing that was mine wasn’t mine after all.”

“I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.” He shakes his head. “And there was more. I just couldn’t see it.”

I mean, it’s not perfect, but I was wrong about how hopeless it was. By accident, we all got a second chance. I want to take it.”

“People are harder to save than you think.

“No,” Seth says, firmly, “what I’ve learned is that there actually is more. There’s you guys. You guys are my more.”

“I don’t believe in guardian angels,” Regine says seriously. “Just people who are there for you and people who aren’t.”

He’s drowning in it – (And maybe that, finally, is it –) (Maybe that’s what this has all been –) (Maybe he never stopped drowning –)

“Are you serious? Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.”

“Life does not have to go how you think it will,” Tomasz says. “Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.”

No, life didn’t always go how you thought it might. Sometimes it didn’t make any sense at all. You’ve just got to find a way to live there anyway, Seth thinks.

He’s uncertain what’s going to happen next. But he is certain that that’s actually the point. If this is all a story, then that’s what the story means.

And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more.

Because who can say in the end that any one of these places is more real than any other?

But whatever happens, whatever comes, he knows he can live with it.