I Might Be in Trouble

by Daniel Aleman

but I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes dreams aren’t everything you’d made them out to be.

I remember that I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do this anymore. No more sleeping around, no more wasting my time with men who aren’t right for me. I promised I would stop pursuing people and things and situations that led to me feeling like shit in the end. I said I would focus on what actually matters—writing, getting another book deal, and finding someone who loves me and who I can love back. Someone good. Someone like Jeremy. The thing is, this is not the first time I’ve said these things to myself, not the first time I’ve given myself an ultimatum. It certainly won’t be the last.

Telling myself that somewhere out there, someone is also having a bad day, and the thought makes me feel a bit better somehow—a little less alone.

I stop pacing and look straight into her eyes. This is why I love her. She always has a plan, always knows exactly what to do in a moment of crisis. The thing about today, though, is that her ability to help me can only go so far.

“Live a little,” Stacey says. “Go out there, meet new people, try new things. The right story will find you.”

Stacey stares at me through her glasses for a moment. It’s as if I were a book and she was reading me, trying to understand what’s actually going through my mind.

makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How much an author chooses the story they want to tell, and how much the story chooses them.

Some people are loud in their absence. When they die, they leave behind a hole that can be felt and never filled, but my mom is not one of those people. There is no trace of her around the house, no sign that she was ever even here.

I don’t remember much from the years after she passed away. I guess grief can do that to you—it erases your memory, erases parts of you that you never even knew you were losing until one day you look back and realize that they’re gone.

“He broke me. He left when I needed him the most. He took a piece of me, ran away with it, and never looked back” would’ve had a slightly dramatic ring to it, and my father has never been much for drama.

There’s nothing quite like having someone tell you that you can’t have the things you want to make you work even harder to get them. Nothing like the idea of one day being able to say “You were wrong about me” to give you drive, and focus, and inspiration to keep going.

What I find funny, though, is that people talk about dreams coming true

as if it were a point of arrival—a final destination, and once you’ve reached it, there should be no going back. Once you’ve found the love of your life, you’re not meant to go on living without them. Once you’ve become a successful author, you’re not meant to return to being a struggling writer. Once you’ve reached a certain level of fame, you’re not meant to go back to being unknown, uninteresting, undesirable. Nobody talks about what it’s like to get everything you ever wanted… and then lose it. There’s no rulebook for what to do when that happens. At best, people will show you pity. At worst, they’ll deem you unworthy of the things you had achieved—or even blame you for losing them. Anything to hold on to their idea that realized dreams should be static, and that anyone who finds themself in my position was simply too stupid or too reckless to maintain their success.

The thing is, premises are easy enough to come up with, but it’s not just about finding a story—it’s about finding the story.

It will be intelligent, and provocative, and entirely irresistible, Stacey said, and none of the ideas I’ve had so far feel that way. None of them excite me the way that they should.

The thing is, I didn’t know then what I know now: that bitch was lying. Heartbreak is not fun, making a living as a writer is hard, and there is no sex worth having in this city.

I’ll never understand why everyone is so quick to judge people with daddy issues, but not the fathers who are responsible for causing those issues in the first place.

There is an assuredness to him—he knows what he likes, and he also seems to know what I’ll like before I’ve even figured it out myself.

But he doesn’t always fuck me hard. He switches up the pace, so at times it’s fast and thrilling, and at others it’s slow and romantic.

I just love being gay. It’s perfectly okay to have sex with someone whose name you don’t know. Ask that same person out for a drink, and well… you run the risk of being too forward.

was sitting inside my apartment all alone, searching for a story to tell, but I suppose Stacey was right: a story has found me, and it’s much better than anything I could’ve come up with myself.

And that is all I want—to be known by him, to be understood, to be desired.

I’ve always gone for logical, numerical men—they tend to be a good complement to my uncertain, creative chaos.

“Well,” he says, “it is my job to assess risk. To place bets on people and things that will come out on top. For what it’s worth… I would bet on you.”

But I guess I started writing more seriously after my mom died. That’s when telling stories became… a necessity, almost.”

“It’s just… when I’m writing, I can be anyone I want to be. I can say all the things that sometimes I don’t dare to speak out loud.”

my grandmother used to go so far as to say that there are two versions to each of us: who we are in public, and who we are in private, when no one is watching.” “Which one do you feel like now?” “Neither,” Robert answers, the twinkling lights reflecting in his eyes. “There must be a third version of me I didn’t know about: who I am when I’m with you.”

It’s like I’ve been waiting for him my whole life, and now that he’s here, everything finally makes sense.

God, I’m so drunk. But so happy. Drappy. Is that even a word? Let me google it to find out. Or, better yet, I should type it into my notes app so I can use it in my next book. It’s a brilliant word.

Holy fuck, he’s dead! What the hell happened last night? Did I kill him? Oh my God, I must have killed him.

No one ever warned me this could happen. No one ever told me friendships could fade so easily, or that the older you get, the harder it is to form new connections. No one ever said I might find myself here, with absolutely nobody to call in an emergency and nobody to come to my rescue. I don’t understand how I ended up so alone, don’t get why it is that every single person I’ve ever known has either left or given up on me.

Stacey doesn’t seem angry, doesn’t seem the least bit outraged or surprised, which makes me wonder two things. The first is whether she had been expecting to find something like this all along—whether she has always thought me capable of murder, so that when I called earlier, she automatically assumed that’s what had happened. The second is whether this is the first dead body she’s ever seen—and something is telling me it isn’t.

All I truly know about Stacey is that she’s passionate about publishing and she’s been married several times… and didn’t I hear a rumor once that a couple of those husbands died under somewhat mysterious circumstances?

He just couldn’t find a way to fix me. He couldn’t find a way to put the pieces of me back together, and he came to the realization that the only way to save himself from also breaking was to get away—to look for an apartment of his own, move out, and seek some peace.

So, no. I don’t blame him. I have wished he had never come into my life, and I’ve cursed his name a million times, and I’ve spent all of last year wondering why things had to turn out this way, but I’ve never truly faulted or hated him. I love him. Always have, always will, even now that we’re standing here acting like strangers and not former lovers.

“Different people draw the line at different places, darling. I’m not here to judge.” “Well, I draw the line at married!”

That’s something positive to be said about New York, I suppose—as long as you’re not a slow walker, no one cares what you do.

Maybe his fragile ego needed the attention of other men—younger men—so he could feel worthy, important, and desirable.

Perhaps, no matter how hard I try to rack my brain, all I’ll be left with is this: the humiliation of being lied to, the heartbreak of believing that he was someone he wasn’t, the fear that I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting last night’s encounter, and the certainty that I’m not good enough. Not good enough for a steady, successful career, not good enough for my family, not good enough for an exciting, genuine love story.

instinct. I wish I was able to differentiate between the guys who want to date me and the ones who want to fuck me, lie to me, and ruin my life. It would’ve saved me from more than one awful situation.

“there are only two things you should never ask a woman: how many fake designer pieces she owns, and whether she’s killed any of her husbands.”

“So? Are we ready now to admit that we’re fucked?” “Not yet. If there’s anything I’ve learned after four decades of editing manuscripts, it’s that every plot hole has a solution. We just haven’t figured it out yet.”

But then, without warning, something happens. I start to write. In the morning, in the darkness of the night. By the window while soft summer winds rattle the leaves of the trees along the street, and in bed on days when I’m feeling so weak that words become my only form of sustenance.

A guy who grew up with a fractured sense of belonging and identity, and who now feels forgotten, left behind, cast aside—by his family, his former friends, and his ex-boyfriend. A guy whose entire life has become a mess without him even realizing it, and whose most desperate wish is simply to be seen, to be wanted, to be loved.

There’s something about the thought of other people reading my words that terrifies me. It almost breaks through the safety I’ve started to feel lately. They may as well be in the room with me, looking over my shoulder while I work on the next few chapters.

I swear, I cannot spend longer than a minute inside this house without being made to feel inadequate.