Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.”

I am aware that this is not the way anything is supposed to work. The job, the opportunity, the positive attention. It feels unearned, even though I am in my mid-thirties and it’s not like I haven’t been unsuccessfully writing things—some of them funny—for years. But the thing about success is that it doesn’t seem like a natural result of unsuccessfulness. It feels like success comes despite a lack of success. Or, if you achieve some level of success, your lack of success in the past should be retrofitted as stepping-stones along the path of your rise. And that’s true and not true. Did I have a plan? No. Did it work out? Seems like it.

I don’t exactly know what I’m doing. Or why. (Put that on my tombstone: Here lies R. Eric; he didn’t exactly know what he was doing.) Nevertheless, I’m trying it. (Correction: please put that on my tombstone. Here lies R. Eric. He tried it.)

The danger in a city is systemic and endemic; it’s built into the walls and the street corners and written in invisible ink on the mortgages and in the local newspaper headlines; it powers the public transportation and funds the political campaigns. The danger in the city is all around you, but has clearly delineated borders.

She knew that grief was the thing that had forced her out of her old life, waving from the train platform as she left. And it was the malevolent mystery sending her postcards from the past with the words “Wish you were here” scribbled across the back. Grief had been her first friend in this new world. It made itself known, an apparition, at points throughout her history and her present and, she presumed, her future, too.

— We saw more and more of each other, working together in the after-school daycare program and congregating in the school library with a crew of erudite girls from both of our grades, the kind of slightly-too-smart group that talked about Rent and gossip and foreign languages with equal passion, that dated only occasionally—as teenage boys are, by and large, a disappointment—and earned kind but clear reprimands from librarians for laughing too loud on a regular basis.

One of the most fascinating things about the Dewey decimal system is that while there are distinct categories for every subject imaginable, it also allows for internal referencing, acknowledging that while a book may be about one subject and exist in one place, it also has a corollary placement elsewhere. At the same time. And that’s okay. I understood that a book could be many things at once, without conflict or contradiction, long before I realized it about people. Or, at least, long before I admitted it.

There are probably few more interesting date options than lazily wandering the aisles of a library or a bookstore. Better if you’re getting paid for it. Not that we were on dates or that we were dating. That would be untrue. But if you were inclined to get to know someone, to show them a piece of yourself, to perhaps fall a little bit in love, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better way than by spending hours picking up books, flipping them open, and talking about what you find inside.

Electra and I laughed at the size of the corsage. It seemed a bit ridiculous. Then again, everything about prom seemed a bit ridiculous: the awkwardness of taking photos in the vestibule of her house, the fact that my parents had followed the limo I rented in their own car with my ambivalent younger brothers and no less than three cameras, like paparazzi. We were embarrassed and happy and eager to get out of there and loving every minute.

Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush, after all, there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it: it will bloom or it will wither. But love? Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.

I really loved her. Isn’t that something? Before I knew myself, before I knew that sexuality was a spectrum, before the difficulties of college and becoming and stepping out into the world, I fell in love with a young woman in high school. We had a friendship that bloomed into a prom date like the culmination of a teen romcom. It’s a simple story. And one that could end right there. Except it doesn’t. Or rather it won’t.

When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.

I tell this story because of what knowledge it began in me—the complexity of love, the shape-shifting heaviness of grief, and the possibility of tragedy. I tell this story because she left before the end and I’m trying to find her in the darkness. And with her, a piece of myself. I tell this story because I believe that somewhere, still, two teenagers are standing outside a library, and their eyes are ringed with tears. And in this place, she hugs me, and I whisper in her ear, and anything is possible, for anyone. Forever.

For all of love’s complications, I think every couple’s story starts with two strangers who, if they want to survive, must move heaven and hell to reach each other.

It’s easy, I guess, to look back now and say that everything turned out okay and Jay has moved on and I’m married and we all lived happily ever after, as if none of the sadness left a mark, as if winter never came, as if now is all that matters. But that place in me that compulsively cried to everyone who would listen is still in me; the bad times don’t go away just because times are good. We say these things build character; they make us who we are. And that’s true. But that doesn’t mean they don’t suck. It doesn’t mean winter isn’t cold.

We had the easiness that comes from knowing the same stories and knowing which parts you’re supposed to say at what time. I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.

Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time. We were born grasping after freedom, in a house that could not hold us; every day we get closer and closer to our destination, until our features come into view. Soon, everyone further on down the family line can see us from their seats at the table; we’re coming home. Set a place for us. We’re hungry, we have so much to talk about, and we’re coming home.

Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?

I think it’s important to revel in the small things that make us joyful, to indulge when possible and not problematic, to steal laughter and hoard it. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d fight for a cheese grove’s right to exist. Because if there’s no cheese grove, what are we even fighting for? (I believe it was Winston Churchill who said that.) I call my senator, a lot. Just to chat. I write letters and commentary to stake a claim for the things I believe in. I vote. I march. I tap-dance for justice. And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

There’s a certain poetry to time travel. In the place of the hard, incremental work of effecting change in reality—calling your senator, voting, drinking detox tea, and then waiting—you get to see your impact appear in an instant, fully formed, functional, for better or worse. You get to find out how it ends. You get to see time unspool before your eyes and then knit itself back together again, hopefully better, hopefully brighter, hopefully overflowing with cheese groves.

I do not understand the people in disaster movies who want to survive so that they can rebuild society. That sounds terrible. So boring, and yet so much work. Haven’t these people ever worked at a small nonprofit? It’s that. But with, like, zombies. No thanks.

And if the post-apocalypse comes about because of a massive plague or something, I have no useful medical or scientific skills. Once again, I’m out. I would like to be Patient 15. Maybe Patient 20. No higher than 50. I don’t want to be Patient Zero, because then everyone would blame me, which is rude. What you’re not going to do is besmirch my fair-to-middling name in your dystopian digest. I’ll tell you that much. I don’t want to go first. I just want to go early, while they’re still doing nice tributes to the victims on television and I can get my own grave plot.

Our government, old, creaky, barely continent, is hard enough to run as it is now. The dystopian government wants to, like, enslave all women or set up a national murder game? We can’t even get single-payer healthcare, so I feel like this is overreaching.

The problem is doomsday isn’t coming. And I don’t think we can turn back the hands of time or whisper to the cloud of dust, as much as I’d like to. I think we’re obsessed with dystopian or apocalyptic scenarios because, despite their darkness, they’re comparatively easy outs. Kind of like how sometimes you wish your company would just go out of business so that you’d have to go on unemployment and finally finish your novel or paint the study or hike the Appalachian Trail like you’ve always wanted. Actually living, getting up every day with all the fears and tragedies and challenges and potential joys of being a human in regular old neutral-smelling, depressing times, is hard enough. But it’s what we’re given: flowers and sunshine and push alerts on our phones and midterm elections; pop-up restaurants and flawed history books and strangers in offices who become parts of our lives. There’s fighting for social justice and being brokenhearted about deaths that could have been avoided and being terrified about bringing a kid into this world and being even more terrified about leaving a kid in this world and trying to figure out how to wake up every day not thinking that the world is going to end. Even though it will. I’m here for that. That mid-topian life.

How are we supposed to live without a meteor bearing down on us? How are we supposed to find the best parts of humanity without a brutal regime at the door? How are we supposed to tell the people we love that we love them if we’re not five minutes from being destroyed? That’s the challenge of being alive.

This act—daring to say that we believe in each other—is political. Daring to say that we believe in something, anything, is political. Daring to believe that we’ll exist in the future in America is political.