Honesty

by Seth King

Maybe humans were set in stone, and all you could do was point them in the right direction and pray they didn’t fall out of the sky.

First you thought you knew everything. Then you discovered you knew nothing. Then you learned that knowing nothing was okay. Then you started over from there.

All I knew for sure was that I would try to search for more beautiful sunsety moments and try to live inside more confused, breathless instances where someone I loved looked down at my shirt and took a pause and realized they loved me back. I would try to find more lovely little conversations where a stranger’s eyes clouded over and they realized they could not be anything other than honest with me, and I would try to one day fall in love with myself the way I fell in love with strangers on the street.

I wanted to look at the forest and see the trees, I wanted to wake up in the morning and look at the day as something to chase instead of something to hide from. Tomorrow was never promised, regret was terrible and easy to

avoid, and love was the mother of everything under the sun. That’s what I thought, at least.

At some point you just had to drop the charade and step into the person you were. Eventually you had to let go of the person you’d never become and accept your life for what it had had never been. Things were going to blow, and you just had to let the shrapnel hit where it was going to, let the casualties fall where they were going to fall. I couldn’t be normal if I tried – that just wasn’t an option for me

We were all the same in the end, just a bunch of hurt creatures with small galaxies of horror revolving within ourselves that we were too scared to let out. And maybe I could do the brave thing and let it all out…

After all, humans were just small, breakable mammals on a largely unspectacular planet in a thoroughly average solar system located in one unimpressive galaxy out of trillions, who were meant to love each other. That’s all we were. The rest of it was so useless. All we could do was love…

I know who it is for, though. It’s for all the little kids like Coley and Nicky and me, all the kids who have ever been told by classmates and parents and society that they are dirty and inadequate and tainted, all the kids who have ever climbed something and thought about jumping out of hell. More than that, though, it’s for the ones who did jump. It’s for the lost ones, forever silent, that I remained after. I can still try to be brave

enough to change this world I live in – they can’t.