Nothing to See Here

by Kevin Wilson

I wasn’t destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

“You got shit and I know that you want better than shit. But you’re going from shit to gold, and it’s going to be real tough to handle that. I hope you make it.”

I didn’t get angry with her. I knew that my mom loved me, though maybe not in ways that were obvious, that other people would understand. She wanted me to be okay, at least that. But I also knew that my mom didn’t exactly like me. I weirded her out. I cramped her style. It was fine with me. I didn’t hate her for that. Or maybe I did, but I was a teenager. I hated everyone.

“I want to be powerful. I want to be the person who makes big things happen, where people owe me so many favors that they can never pay me back. I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.”

I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed. And that was my life.

I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I’d keep doing the wrong thing.

Maybe that’s what children were, a desperate need that opened you up even if you didn’t want it.

A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.

From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it’s hard to summon it when you really need it.

He looked like he had no idea how anything in his life had fallen out the way that it had. I felt the same way.

I don’t know why, with these demon children bursting into flames right in front of me, their bad haircuts remaining intact was the magic that fully amazed me, but that’s how it works, I think. The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.

I just closed my eyes and tried to imagine a world where everything worked out.

Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them, too.

They didn’t want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.

This happened a lot, where my body was right here, in the house where I’d grown up, but my mind was hovering just outside it, waiting to see what it was that I was going to do.

And this was what I finally realized, that even as we sank deeper and deeper into our lives, we were always separate. And I wondered what it would feel like, to fall but to hold on to someone else so you weren’t alone.