Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.

I wanted other things, but I didn’t know how to ask for them.

Or at least I think it’s the kind of art that I like, where the obsession of one person envelops other people, transforms them.

I wanted her to understand that there was something so much weirder inside of me, even if she didn’t know exactly what it was.

I can’t quite articulate how, in so many ways, Coalfield controlled how the outside world came to you.

Every single thing that you loved became a source of both intense obsession and possible shame. Everything was a secret.

And I know, in that moment, that my life is real, because there’s a line from this moment all the way back to that summer, when I was sixteen, when the whole world opened up and I walked through it.

To be a teenager, it takes very little to think that someone else might actually know who you are, even as you spend all your time thinking that no one understands you. It’s such a lovely feeling.

“If this is how it starts? It’s almost breathtaking how good your life will be.”

But I also think it’s not so bad if you never quite feel right in this world. It’s still worth hanging around.

He seemed happy, and I was overjoyed, sincerely, to know this. I hadn’t ruined him. He hadn’t ruined me. We’d stayed alive in this world.

Did I want it? I did. I wanted it just so that I could feel that thread that connected me to the past. Is that why we do anything in this life? To feel it vibrate along the line that starts at birth and ends way way way after we die?