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When you have a best friend who knows everything, it saves you a lot of work. If you have a question about anything, all you have to do is turn to her and ask and she’ll just give you all the information you need. Not that life is about information.
Something happened inside me. A huge and uncontrollable wave ran through me and crashed on the shore that was my heart. I suddenly lost my ability to use words, and, I don’t know, I’d never been that angry and I didn’t know what was really happening, because anger wasn’t normal for me.
Dad always said that there was nothing wrong with crying and that if people did more of it, well then, the world would be a better place. Not that he took his own advice. And even though I wasn’t crying, I guess you could say I was a little ashamed of myself—yeah, I was—otherwise I wouldn’t have been hanging my head.
The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across a desert sky. The other thing about tears is that they kind of my made my heart hurt. Ouch.
He read to me that night, my favorite passage from The Little Prince, about the fox and the Little Prince and about taming.
I already knew there were people in the world who hated Mexicans—even Mexicans who weren’t poor. I didn’t need my father to tell me that. And I also knew by then that there were people in the world who hated my father. Hated him because he was gay. And to those people, well, my father didn’t matter. He didn’t matter at all. But he mattered to me.
Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that exists only in theory. And you meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know. That word becomes someone you hate. And you take that word with you wherever you go. And you can’t pretend it isn’t there.
There are certain kinds of words, slurs, hate speech, prejudices, and mockings that people have called one another with the knowledge that it hurts the other person. You want them to hurt, you want them angry, and react because if they do that means those hurtful words you've said have in some way broken them, impacted them, and made them feel less than human.
I had a theory that everyone has a relationship with words—whether they know it or not. It’s just that everybody’s relationship with words is different. Dad told me once that we have to be very careful with words. “They can hurt people,” he said. “And they can heal people.” If anyone was careful with words, it was my dad.
Sometimes you have to let people have their own space—even when you are in the same room with them.
“But you know we’re always going to have to rely on the goodwill of those of you who are straight for our survival. And that’s the damned truth.”
I saw how he hated that. I saw it isn’t fair written in his eyes. It isn’t fair. I wanted to tell him that all the awful things that happened in the old world were dead. And the new world, the world we lived in now, the world we were creating, that world would be better.
And I wondered how Fito got to be so decent when there wasn’t anybody around teaching him how to be decent. I just didn’t understand the human heart. Fito’s heart should have been broken. But it wasn’t. And even though there were times when he texted me and told me that life sucked, I knew he didn’t believe it. It’s just that life hurt him sometimes. I guess life hurt everybody. I didn’t understand the logic of this thing we called living. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.
“I told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.”
She held me in her arms. I wanted to hold on to her and never let go. But I was going to have to let go. And that hurt. Why does it hurt when you love someone? What is it with the human heart? What was it with my heart? I wondered if there was a way to keep her in this world forever. And it was as though she were reading my mind. “No one is meant to live forever,” she whispered. “Only God lives forever. You see these hands? Hands get old. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, mijito. Even the heart gets old.”
I think we all believe for a good part of our lives that we are invincible, that death won't touch us and that death won't come for those we love. But it does. And it doesn't hurt any less if the person we lose we've known for years or known for hours. Because at our core our heart knows we've lost someone who meant something to us. We grieve and grieve and neve fully accept the loss, time only makes it hurt less and less.
Well, I guess that when you found yourself in the dark, you might as well whistle. It wasn’t always going to be morning, and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn’t whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up.
“I think it means that it’s not other people who make you feel like you’re alone. You do it to yourself.” “Smart boy. I lived apart from my family because I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust that they loved me enough. Shame on me. I’ll never get those years back.” He looked over at me. “Don’t ever underestimate the people who love you.”
“I know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don’t have neat logical plots, and we don’t always say beautiful, intelligent things like the characters in a novel. That’s not the way life is. And we’re not like letters—”
There were different kinds of silences between us. Sometimes the silences meant that we knew each other so well that we didn’t need words. Sometimes the silences meant that we were mad at each other. And sometimes the silences meant that we didn’t know each other at all.
I remembered him telling me that love was infinite. Infinity, that isn’t like the pi thing in math. Or maybe it is. Love has no end—it just goes on and on.
Barren. That’s how it felt. That’s how I felt. I found myself on my knees. I was wordless and lost, and I had never known anything that felt like this, this, this hurt in the heart, this emptiness, and I wished right then I didn’t have a heart, but I knew I had one and I couldn’t wish it away. I couldn’t wish away the hurt or the tears. I don’t know how long I knelt there on the winter soil.
“Grief is a terrible and beautiful thing.” “I don’t think it’s so beautiful.” “The hurt means you loved someone. That you really loved someone.”
There was nothing wrong with getting angry. It was what you did with that anger that mattered.
finally understood something about life and its inexplicable logic. I’d wanted to be certain of everything, and life was never going to give me any certitude.
That’s the way it was when you loved someone. You took them everywhere you went—whether they were alive or not.
