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February 17 - February 25, 2021
Reginald told them of his cursed life in less than an hour, and instilled their tiny, wildly beating hearts with the kind of fear children didn’t normally stumble upon until they were older,
Esther was always surprised by how easy Jonah was able to open locked things; she had a feeling he had the same knack with locked people.
Thank you, she mouthed to Jonah. He nodded, smiling casually, like he hadn’t just done the most extraordinary thing in the world.
They were teenagers, and they were powerless, and until they were adults they had no choice but to let their destinies be bent and swayed by outside forces.
People only understood mental illness up to a certain point. Beyond that point, their patience waned. She knew this, because she felt it sometimes with Eugene. With her mother. With her father. The desire just to take them by the shoulders and shake them and say, “Get better! Be better! For God’s sake, fix yourself!”
The cumulative total of their collective pain was too much to bear. It was easy enough to hurt for yourself; hurting for other people was what broke you.
What had she done to herself? How had she let this happen? How had she allowed the boy who pickpocketed her at a bus stop become a person who could make her come undone?
“Why do you stay? Every time I think you’ve had enough of me . . . you come back for more.”
“You really don’t know?” Jonah took a step back. Rubbed his eyes. “Because I . . . I kind of love you, Esther.”
You’re the only person I care about who’s solid and I don’t want to . . . to ruin you.”
Love was a trap, a sticky trap of molasses meant to bind two people together. It was a thing that couldn’t be escaped, a weight that people strapped to their own legs before they waded into the water and wondered why they drowned.
She’d seen the thing people called love, the thing romantic movies were made about, and the power of it scared the shit out of her.
“No way I can prove you wrong about love, unless you’ve gone and fallen in love with me too.”
As soon as you admitted to loving someone, you suddenly had a lot to lose. You freely gave them a way to hurt you.
You can love someone with all your soul and still hate yourself enough to want to die.”
“Of course it’s not going to be easy. You’re fighting a war against yourself. Every time either side makes ground, you’re the one who gets hurt. But it’s not about winning the war against your demons. It’s about calling a truce and learning how to live with them peacefully. Promise me you’ll keep fighting.”
How could death not be appealing, when the only thing that gave him comfort in life was being unconscious?
You want a simple solution to a complex problem. Well, there is none. People get depression and develop gambling addictions and have strokes and die in car crashes and get hit by the people who should love them, and it’s not because they were cursed by Death. That’s just how it is.”
“No. I know you love me. This just proves to me that love was exactly what I thought it was all along. The power to cause pain.”
What Esther wanted to say: We’ve all been living without you for years. What makes you think having you here now is enough to make up for that?
“Why do you bother living, knowing you will have to die?”
“That is the other mistake people make. To think Death regrets nothing.”
For the first time, all the broken bits of her family and herself seemed fixable; curses couldn’t be broken, but mental illnesses could be treated.
most of the time people were neither good nor bad, not righteous or evil, they were just people. And sometimes love, even if it was all they had to offer, was enough. It had to be.
“I don’t want people to know I’m crazy, you know?” “Oh, honey. You slit your wrists with a veterinary scalpel. I think it might be a little late for that.”
I mean, who saves the superheroes when they’re mentally ill?”
“Everyone we let into our lives has the power to hurt us. Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t, but that’s not a reflection of us, or our strength. Loving someone who hurts you doesn’t make you weak.”
“That’s just the thing. It had nothing to do with you. So maybe love isn’t the poison you think it is. Maybe people just make mistakes. Maybe they’re even worthy of our forgiveness if they hurt us.”
trying to wrap her head around the undeniable fact that her grandfather no longer had a body, that the electrical signals that had sparked through his brain making him him no longer sparked . . . it made no sense. She was a smart and (mostly) rational human being, and still she couldn’t make herself understand how it was possible that he was just . . . gone.
And then the thought that she herself would die . . . Well, that was another panic attack entirely.
HOW TO RECOVER FROM THE HEINOUS BETRAYAL OF YOUR GOOD FRIEND/LOVE INTEREST IN FOUR SIMPLE STEPS
For the last month, like Dr. Butcher had said, the videos had been a splinter digging into her mind and ignoring them had only caused an infection that seemed to leak out into everything she did.
STEP FOUR. Send the We make a perfect pear card back to Jonah.
I believed that I was a square peg in a world full of round holes, and that something inside me was fundamentally damaged somehow. I believed that I was not built to love or be loved, and I was afraid that if anyone saw me—like, really saw me—they would realize I was broken.
But life was rarely full of clean and tidy resolutions. Good moments would inevitably, again, lead to bad moments, which would lead to more good moments, until there was nothing left but dust and stories.
Love was a mirror that made our bright bits shine like stars and dulled even the harshest ugliness. We loved to love because it made us beautiful. And maybe there was nothing wrong with that.
