Honesty

by Seth King

What must it be like, I wondered, to look out at the world through galaxies every day instead of eyes?

Nobody felt this much emotion in the world, and I needed to become anybody but me. I’d had a taste for straight guys (or “straight” guys, anyway) all my life, and each time it had ended in slash-and-burn devastation. I’d imagined guys like Nicky being into me a million times, thinking I saw a habit or noticed a little tic that pointed to Gay Town, and then I’d fall desperately in love with them only to come to school the following Monday and watch them make out with

a cheerleader named Christine while I stood alone by the Coke machine. Maybe I had to quit this bad religion – I just didn’t know how.

My dad wasn’t outwardly mean or anything, he was just careless and casual with his comments, which was worse in my eyes.

The casual kind of cruelty hurt the worst, as it usually rolled off the lips of the ones we loved most. Sometimes we let our loved ones pick and pick and pick at us until suddenly there was nothing left to save.

I’d always been horrified by this whole thing he did where he tried to be a meat-eating, all-American male with me, and it made me squirm on my couch.

That love just came with strings attached, and I didn’t know how much longer I could play this game without reaching up and snipping myself free, no matter where it made me fall.

Would he still love me when he knew the truth about me, or did he just love who he wanted me to be?

(What was it about infatuation that made you abandon all logic and become a total psycho stalker?)

I still didn’t even know who “myself” was, but I did know that person didn’t charm anyone.

Book lovers were also fools, in a way. Everyone knew they could never find love, because all they did was compare real life to life within the page. And spoiler alert: the page always won.

Was this what all the authors were writing about, with all their lovey-dovey shit?

Who I loved was as much a part of me as my hair color or the fact that I was right-handed at everything except taking photos. Boys were in my DNA.

it. I didn’t want to believe that someone’s past defined them. I wanted to believe that we were not what happened to us, we were what we did about it.

Two disastrous parents, a crippling sense of inferiority…by those standards, I was dead in the water. The past shaded everything I did – every time I tried to make a big decision, strike out on my own, I was pulled backwards into the nightmares. When would I bloom into the adult I’d always imagined? When would none of this matter anymore?

As I watched him, something dropped in me, sank in my chest like a stone plummeting through the water of a cold lake, and that’s when I knew the million different times I’d told myself I didn’t love this boy had simply been a million different lies.

Which was good, because I’d never be done with him.

I was losing something I’d never even had, but it still hurt.

We listened to the wind outside, and it seemed to carry all the things we couldn’t say, everything we couldn’t fix.

It was a funny thing, when you let someone into the little world you’d created for yourself and then realized you’d suddenly become incapable of imagining it without them.

As everything inside me heated up, I nodded and crawled up off the floor, slinking myself onto the bed, totally unsure of how to act.

Having him this close to me swamped me in feelings I could only describe as red, and I wanted to stay right there forever.

This was a fantasy that was never going to happen. I would never be the son he wanted me to be.

I started to realize more and more just how dangerous it could be to live your life in compartments.

That’s what that boy brought me: for the first time ever, I was living in color. Those deep, previously unexplored feelings and instincts I’d spent my life hiding and burying and denying – he pulled them all to the surface in one dizzying, intoxicating whoosh of Technicolor madness. Sometimes I found myself enjoying the pain, too – he opened up a sublime rage in me that I didn’t even know existed. Hurting him felt like heaven, and I hated myself for how much I wanted to hate him sometimes. He was like a book, one of the really good ones where you had to slip away and press your face close to the page and disappear into the world that was slowly blooming between the two of you. I’d see him, he’d see me, and poof – we’d be gone. Our love existed in an empire that no one knew about but us.

Pain will never be your friend. But with luck and time, you can learn to make it your acquaintance.”

I felt like someone had reached into me, taken one of my ribs, and walked away.

“Because I don’t…I don’t know how to love,”

Up to this point, this thing had been all about sneaking around the truth, hiding the facts and tiptoeing around everything so we could carry on with our whole sad charade of being “straight.”

Tomorrow, today would be yesterday. We were all stories in the end, and one day soon we would be in the past to somebody from the future.

“You have witnessed dysfunction all your life, and when you grow up, you are going to chase after it. You won’t even know it, not on the surface at least, but you will. You’ll search for people to fix, because that’s what you know – you thrive on chaos, even if you don’t know it yet, and you’re going to try to replicate your childhood. So find a sane person with no issues and stick with them. If you run after destroyed people, all you’ll do is destroy yourself in the process, too. You’ll undo each other.

I didn’t love myself enough to remove myself from the pain I was still chasing from my childhood.

My family had made my bed with their chaos and now I was forcing myself to sleep in it forever. My childhood was over and now I’d become my destiny. I was already Me, incurably.

Maybe everything beautiful fell to pieces.

Put something in love’s path and it will crack stone, conceal love and it will break through and move mountains. Deny love and it will explode, run from love and it will overtake you. Kill love and watch love’s revenant, imprison love and watch it break free and sing.

“Chains come in all shapes and sizes, squirt. Some of them we even make for ourselves.” He looked down at me, something unknowable in his eyes. “None of us get to choose our own paths for ourselves, anyway, not really. I came from a long line of screw-ups, and my son is likely pegged for the same fate. We never got out. That’s the thing about destiny – most of the time, the world decides it for you.”

That’s all I was. A fool who’d believed in lies and galaxy eyes.

“go to where your passions flow.”

I fell asleep sobbing into my pillow for that little boy.

Hey there, I’ve been living a secret life and I’m in pieces because of the death of a stranger whose name you’ve never heard, can I come over and fall apart?

I met his eyes. “And what if we find ourselves in that river?” “Just keep swimming,” he said. “Swim against the current until the current changes. That’s bravery.” Something in his eye sparkled, and I didn’t really know what it meant.

“What you just told me wasn’t easy. Hell, I’m fifty-four years old and I still can’t say it. So I admire you. I truly admire you. I just want you to know that.”

I’d lost three grandparents already, and I knew how this all worked. I knew a day would come when I would no longer be able to breathe in a quick burst of future air and use it to synthesize his crisp, clean scent, and I knew there would come a night when I would try to picture him saying something and realize I’d forgotten what his voice had sounded like. He’d be gone. I would probably forget the way he moved, the way he laughed, the exact proportions of his jaw, the way his face looked in the light of July. I would wear his clothes until they fell apart and keep his things until I lost them, and soon I would have nothing left to remember him by. But I knew I

would never forget how that boy made me feel – like I was in the company of clouds, like the sun had found a home inside my throat, like I wasn’t me anymore. Those feelings were mine forever.

Somewhere deep within the boy I still was, I really did want my daddy to be proud of me. I would always be somebody’s kid, no matter how old I thought

Because now I knew the truth, and it was a taste so bitter I could spit. I would never be free. Not at all. Not until I could wake up in the morning and make my own decisions, walk down the street holding hands with the person I loved. Too much fear and hatred in this world was holding me back. It was holding us all back. We were so far back, we were behind ourselves, actually. We could do so much better.

Maybe I’d zip over to Target to run from the loneliness, where I would’ve watched a mom catch her little boy in the Barbie section and yank him away by the arm, or maybe listened to a bunch of teenaged boys jokingly call each other faggots and cocksuckers.

maybe one soul just lived inside the other until they could join again in a different world.

The act of grieving meant so much more when you were doing it in the center of a group of people who loved you, or had at least loved the same person as you. What did my lonesome grief mean to the world? Nothing. People had to know about this, but they never would. I had nowhere to run – I was still closeted to my friends, my mom barely wanted anything to do with my life, and my dad was, well, my dad. The world had erased ColeyAndNickyVille.

Fate is an artist, and every human body contains two souls intertwined like brushstrokes on an artist’s canvas – yours, and the soul of the person you were born to meet.