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As long as you live, there’s always something waiting; and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living. (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood)
Every book I read and movie I watch seems to give out the same message: high school is the worst experience you can ever have.
“If I want to carry a purse, I’m going to carry it. I’m not going to not carry it just because they don’t like it.”
“People are shitty for a lot of reasons. Sometimes they’re just shitty people. Sometimes people have been shitty to them and, even though they don’t realize it, they take that shitty upbringing and go out into the world and treat others the same way. Sometimes they’re shitty because they’re afraid. Sometimes they choose to be shitty to others before others can be shitty to them. So it’s like self-defensive shittiness.”
This is where I take things apart and put them back together in new and stupefying ways. The way I wish I could do with myself.
Me. I’d rather not lose me.
Yes. All right now. That’s me. Nothing will ever be okay again, not in the same way, but I’m getting used to it.
For someone so lanky, he’s strong, and I summon all the strength I have to peel him off like a Band-Aid. And then I punch him in the mouth.
“Better to be the hunter than the hunted. Even if you’re hunting yourself.”
When my mom went away, I went empty too. Like all of me just flooded out and disappeared. In the hospital, I held her hand until my grandmother came in, and my dad, and the rest of my family. All of them sweet and loving and brokenhearted, but none of them like my mom. Not even all together. They didn’t begin to add up to her.
This is exactly why I don’t do social media. So many mean comments and snarky comments and bullying disguised as I’m only expressing my opinion, as the Constitution of our great country requires me to do. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. Blah blah blah.
Except that only small people—the inside-small kind—don’t like you to be big.
My mom used to say sometimes it’s actually about the other person and you just happen to be there. Like sometimes the other person needs to learn a lesson or go through an experience, good or bad, and you’re just an accessory in some way, like a supporting actor in whatever their scene happens to be.
This was the thing Mom did—looked at all sides of things. She believed that situations and people were almost never black-and-white.
I said, “I’m here. Please don’t go. Please stay. Wake up. Please wake up. Please don’t leave me. Please please please. If anyone can come back, it’s you. Please come back. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me alone.” Because if she went away, that’s what I would be.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from counseling and losing my mom, it’s that it’s best to just say what’s on your mind. If you try to carry everything around all the time, pretty soon you end up flat on your back in bed, too big to get up or even turn over.
I’m looking at her, and I’m charged with all this crazy, heart-pounding adrenaline. It’s almost as if she’s interviewing me, but I don’t mind because it’s the first time I’ve talked about this with anyone, and it’s kind of feeling a lot like freedom, like Here’s a person who might actually be able to get who I am.
I say, “Hey, little man, how was school today?” “Okay.” “Real okay or fake okay?” “Somewhere in between.”
As Libby brushes past, I think of sunshine. It’s her shampoo or her soap, or maybe it’s just her.
It’s her. Always. It’s the suddenness of life changing in an instant that makes me anxious when I sleep and makes me tell myself to breathe when I’m awake.
“You can’t use cancer as an excuse for shittiness anymore.”
Trust me. You think no one understands and you’re alone, and that makes you angrier, and Why don’t they see it? Why doesn’t someone say, ‘Hey, you seem burdened by the world. Let me take that burden for a while so you don’t have to carry it around all the time.’ But it’s on you to speak up.”
We never know how long we have. We’re never guaranteed tomorrow. I could die right now, right here. It could be over in an instant.
She woke up like it was any other day, just like I did, just like Dad did. We thought it was a regular, normal day. None of us knew we were waking up to the worst day. If we’d known, what would we have done? Would we have held on to her tight and tried to keep her here?
What would Mom want me to do right now? If she could see me, what would she say?
Two hours later, when I get back in the Land Rover, it still smells like her. Sunshine.
“One person in every fifty is face-blind. It might help for you to remember that. You’re definitely not alone.”
His eyes are on mine again, and he says, “As someone recently diagnosed with prosopagnosia, I’m told that I don’t process faces like normal people. For instance, I avoid the eyes. But I don’t seem to have any trouble looking into yours. In fact, I like looking into them. A lot.”
Libby is solid. She is real. As long as I hold her hand, she won’t vanish before my eyes.
“You are the most amazing person I’ve ever met. You’re different. You’re you. Always. Who else can say that except maybe Seth Powell, and he’s an idiot. You, Libby Strout, are not an idiot.”
And I get it. He wants to stay in this moment. The bad moments always have a way of coming around again, way too soon.
In that moment of falling, they say the memory goes wide open. You can see things you don’t usually think of or see or remember. For me, it was my mother’s face—specifically, it was her eyes. I can’t remember what they looked like in that moment I saw them, but I remember that I saw them.
And now my heart is nowhere on earth to be found. I can see it as it bypasses the moon and the stars and goes blasting into another galaxy.
This is one more thing I’ll never get to share with my mom, and before I know it, I’m crying. I miss her,
I’m on the highway now and everything is whooshing by, but then I start whooshing along with it all, just like everyone else, like I actually belong out here in this world. Like I could drive all the way up into the clouds, propelled by happiness and freedom.
I’m taking you to the moon and back, and while we’re up there, I’m going to collect the stars for you so that you can keep them.
I brought you here because you’re better than some shitty Amos chain restaurant. I brought you here because when I was six, I fell off the roof of our house, and my dad smuggled a Clara’s pizza into the hospital, and those kinds of memories are pretty rare for me right now—the ones where my dad is this really great guy. I brought you here because this is the first place I wanted to go after I got out of the hospital and was well enough to sit up straight. I brought you here because it’s one of the few places in a sixty-mile radius, if not the entire state of Indiana, that isn’t boring or
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“Libby Strout, you deserve to be seen.” “People can’t help but see me.” She says this to the tablecloth. “That’s not what I mean.”
If ever a song was written for Libby and me, it’s this one. Two broken, lonely people who maybe aren’t so broken or lonely anymore.
At first I’m aware of every eye in the room on us, but then all the faces fade away, and it’s just Libby and me, my hands on her waist, all that woman in my arms. We’re in perfect sync, moving together, making it up as we go.
He kisses me where the tears would be if I’d let them fall, and it’s the single loveliest thing anyone has ever done who wasn’t my mom.
He may not have kissed me after our date, but it’s almost definitely, undeniably, absolutely guaranteed that he will.
I want to say It’s okay to be a person. We’re all afraid. We all get hurt. It’s okay to hurt. You’d be so much more likable if you just acted human.
It won’t change the fact that there will always be this part of me that’s searching for her, even if she’s right there.
“You can’t always be fine. No one’s always fine. And I know you’re used to being on your own, and I know I should have been a better friend so that you didn’t have to get used to being on your own, but I’m here now, and I wish you’d talk to me.”
I pull myself to standing, and as I do, this feeling comes over me. It’s this kind of quiet, peaceful feeling, and that’s her, that’s my mom. I want it to last, to keep her with me.
I know this move because I’ve done it a hundred times.
I know what you’re thinking—if you hate it so much and it’s such a burden, just lose the weight, and then that job will go away. But I’m comfortable where I am. I may lose more weight. I may not. But why should what I weigh affect other people? I mean, unless I’m sitting on them, who cares?
Life is too short to judge others. It is not our job to tell someone what they feel or who they are. Why not spend some time on yourself instead?
As for the rest of you, remember this: YOU ARE WANTED. Big, small, tall, short, pretty, plain, friendly, shy. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, not even yourself. Especially not yourself.
