The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

There’s a certain brand of crazy that’s reserved special for the American South,

It’s a natural fear, I get it. All humans, whether they know it or not, are profoundly impacted by their imminent deaths. Mortality is unbearably confronting, so much so that lots of people spend their whole lives trying to live as though it doesn’t chain them like it does the rest of us.

One day I’ll die. One day you will.

I don’t like my mom. I never really have, not for a long time, and you’ll get it eventually. It sounds callous to say it now out of context, but context is everything. I love her, sure—an abstract love that stems from a place sadder and deeper and more desperate for acceptance than I care to acknowledge exists within me, but I don’t particularly like her.

That the worst, most shameful day of my life to date would in turn become the most defining.

oh my God, he’s perfect, and fuck. I don’t have a crush on him. I like him. I think I like him a lot. I also think I should definitely not like him a lot. It’s been about thirty seconds since I met him, and I’m enamored with him.

I don’t want the addict to think I’m an alcoholic as well as a whore, so.

She was as annoying about them as Anne of Gables is about—I don’t know—fuck me, pick a topic—everything?

Childish. I know. So, so childish. But there’s something about being around your siblings that makes you regress.

Not in some magical Cinderella-y, slow-motion moment…more like how the Munchkins all turn in horror every time the Wicked Witch of the West lands in.

“I never feel see-through and I never feel readable. I never feel like that, but with you I do.”

He’s twenty-six. I just want to remind you that he’s twenty-six.

Beckett Lane raped me for a year, and my sister knew it too and did fuck-all to help me.

“I kind of just wanted a dad.”

“You didn’t really know me,” I tell my dad. “You didn’t even try. And now you’re dead, so I can’t know you either.”

“Your God sounds pretty cool,

There are a lot of kinds of love in the world, and not all of them make sense all of the time.

The way love was delivered to Oliver, full of conditions and hoops to jump through and lies to abide by, being loved and being hurt were two sides of the same coin.

I don’t think you just stop loving someone once they’re suddenly gone. I think that’s what makes it hard.

Sibling relationships are weird. There’s this elasticity to them that’s both comforting and dangerous. Oliver said something sublimely hurtful to me earlier, and I know that he knew it hurt me, even without him knowing all the facts surrounding it. I know he knows what he said about Becks would have been like a punch in my face, and yet there is no apology.

I hated my dad for all the ways he wasn’t there for me and Oliver, but I still wanted him to want to be my dad.

This town to me is full to its brim with regrets and wishes that things were different.

Like, I’m such a fucking idiot for thinking being saved by someone would undo being raped by someone.

He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing.

How can I go back to a life where Sam Penny isn’t kissing me?

because I think I’ve been waiting to know Sam Penny all my life.

“You can have my—fuck—have whatever you want. Have everything.”

I get the distinct feeling that making light of anything that’s caused me pain will never roll over well with him.

His kisses are commas.

it feels conflicted with this swirly mix of excitement and frustration to be in love with him but then to have to pretend I’m not.

I am aware that I am fully naked in front of the person I love in secret.

His eyes were brimming with tears he wouldn’t let himself cry now, but I’d hear him cry them later, chastised for being curious about his sexuality that no one in the world would talk to him about here, and punished for feeding his curiosity on his own accord.

He wasn’t ready to come out. He wasn’t ready for them to officially know what we’d all known all along. He wasn’t ready for them to reject him once and for all.

“Because you don’t look at me how I look at you.”

The nicest thing you can ever do for another human being is see them, and really see them, at that.

To be understood is one of most base desires we as people have, and it was one that Oliver wasn’t only deprived of, but often quite deliberately denied. All our lives he wanted our dad to see him and to care what he saw, and I think just now my brother got a glimpse that our dad did.

“Please! Please, be selfish. For me.”

“I think I’ve waited my whole life for this day.”

What kind of person lets his children be treated how Oliver was treated—how I was treated—when he too was gay and he too was an adulterer?

Loving him how I love him has fucked everything up.

Sam and I, we’re done. We have to be.

“So don’t pull this shit with me, Gige—there’s no failsafe for loving you. Once you’re in, you’re in, and I’m in.”

“I’m not addicted to you, I’m in love with you,” he says matter-of-factly. “I don’t need you, I want you. And I want you because I know you.”

One week a year when they allowed themselves to be themselves, in love and free?

Can you imagine feeling something, loving someone for decades, but not feeling able to do so out loud? And then you have this kid, and in him you see the freedom you’ve always wanted for yourself but weren’t brave enough to pursue.