My Kind of Trouble

by L.A. Schwartz

And yeah, maybe he spent too many of his slivers of free time retreating into books. But autistic burnout was no joke. He couldn’t afford to fall back into more sensitivity and meltdowns and trouble communicating, less able to take care of himself, let alone Lacey. He had to work to be accepted, to be masked, to be useful—sometimes he wished he could just be. Or be someone else, who didn’t have to work so hard at it all. Books gave him that. So, he’d have to settle for reading love stories for the time being. He knew their solace was mostly fantasy, but it was enough to blot out for a while the truth he’d learned, indelible as the ink on their pages, that he and his life were too difficult, too much, for anyone to love. Not love enough to want to stay, anyway. It was enough to let himself imagine that there could be someone.