Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

But I was sixteen. I lived inside of myself way more than I lived inside of this town.

“I want to be an artist,” he told me, like we were both admitting that we weren’t human. We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.

We were sixteen. How did you prevent your life from turning into something so boring that no one wanted to know about it? How did you make yourself special?

I’d never been, but my brothers were there all the time with their girlfriends, with all those popular, effortless kids who did whatever they wanted. I didn’t hate them. I didn’t want to be them. But I had always been curious about how you could live a life where you never worried about repercussions, never considered that the thing you did rippled out into the world.

It was strange, how his absence meant that I had to work hard to keep him out of my mind or else he took up too much space.

“Well, I’m reporting what the facts are, okay?” Hobart replied, starting to get some traction in the face of skepticism, which is how almost every bad idea gets worse.

But I also think it’s not so bad if you never quite feel right in this world. It’s still worth hanging around. You just have to look harder to find the things you love.”

Aaron could get shouty when he was confused, like if he raised his voice, the world would understand that it needed to clarify some shit before things got out of hand.

I wanted to say, “I missed you,” but it wasn’t really true, I was now realizing. I missed teenage Zeke. This guy was a stranger. He was the person I had to talk to in order to get Zeke back.

I didn’t exactly wish that Zeke had stayed, I now understood. I wanted us to be frozen in that moment, for time to have stopped moving forward.