My review of Together We Will Go:
This is, ultimately, a story about comradeship and finding people that
get you--perhaps even more than it's about freedom and choices.
It's also about beauty. So much beauty:
~ Ohhhh that beginning:
Everyone says first-person narratives are bullshit, that there’s no suspense because you know that whoever’s talking can’t die by the end of the story, otherwise who’s writing it? Well, by the time you read this I’ll be dead, along with maybe a dozen others, so I guess the joke’s on you.
~ Now there's a contemporary story:
If you’re over thirty and reading this, you don’t understand that the road between Get a Degree Avenue and Here’s Your Job Boulevard broke down a long time ago. But that’s not your fault. You don’t understand because you can’t understand, because that’s not the world you lived in.
The Civil War was stupid lethal because the generals weren’t living inside the war they were fighting; they were living in the last one. During the Revolutionary War, muskets were shit. You had to get up close, closelikethis if you wanted to hit anything. So when the Civil War came along, the generals used the same tactics they’d used in the Revolutionary War: they ordered their soldiers to line up in rows, elbow to fucking elbow, so close to the enemy they could see each other’s teeth before opening fire with weapons that were a hell of a lot more accurate than muskets. They fought the next war using the strategies of the last one, and six hundred thousand soldiers died because of it.
So when our parents said, Go to college and get your degree so you can get a job, we did it even though we know it doesn’t work that way anymore because we wanted to make you happy, because we wanted to believe what you believed, that the rules still applied, that you walked out of college with a degree in one hand as a recruiter shook the other, offering a job and a salary and a desk and maybe a pension plan that they’ll take away before you get to actually use the goddamn thing but hey, it’s the thought that counts, right? But that’s not true anymore. We will never, ever have the same opportunities you did. Full-time jobs are fading fast, replaced by part-time jobs where you get paid shit money to work long hours that are constantly being shifted around so there’s no stability, no benefits, and no backtalk or you’re fired, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And the American Dream of owning a home someday? How? With what? Everyone I know who graduated college came out $50–80K in the hole for student loans they’ll never pay off, which by the way also shoots down their credit rating, so there’s no savings, no loans, nothing to invest, nothing to buy a home with, and the planet is frying and in thirty years most of us will end up climate refugees, so yeah, there’s that to look forward to. And in return we get shit upon from On High for living at home or not having ambition or putting experience ahead of owning stuff because in case you weren’t paying attention we can’t fucking afford anything.
And that’s why you don’t understand. Not your fault. Not your paradigm. It’s just what it is.
So when I graduated with a degree in writing, my parents expected me to start making a living as a writer rightdamnitnow. What followed instead was seven years of part-time work and full-time rage, sending out short stories and novels and This doesn’t suit our needs and Come back another time and Sorry we can’t help you and Get the hell out.
~ I
love the mix of deadly (hehe) serious topics and, well, this (note: Lisa has arachnoiditis, which means she is in constant pain):
After that, I kind of shut down. I don’t remember much of the last few years. I’ve never traveled. Never had a boyfriend because I creep out the boys; they don’t know how to talk to me and they’re worried they’ll hurt me if they kiss too hard, so whatever mental boner is required for more than that goes limp. I’ve never had sex, never even had an orgasm until I realized I can’t climax from outside stimulation alone. It took a dozen tries before I could get a vibrator deep enough inside to fix the problem. At first I was afraid of passing out from the pain and having my folks walk in to find me sprawled over the bed with a buzzer in my bush, but eventually we became good friends.
~ We get introduced to moar adorable characters:
“Ohmygod, you’re right,” Lisa said, as though there had been some debate about the subject, “you are blue! I couldn’t tell outside. That’s so amazing! Blue is a god color, because there’s blue sky and blue water and blue eyes and blue gems like sapphire, turquoise, and aquamarine but no blue people, because God keeps that color for herself unless you count the people in that movie, what’s the name, the one with the blue people, everybody saw it, you must’ve seen it but what was the naaaame—”
“Avatar?” Karen said, and glanced at me like Holy shit, does this one come with an off switch?
“Avatar, right! That movie was such a spiritual experience! It makes you understand that everything has meaning, but meaning can also be a trap, you know? Sometimes we start with the story of us, the meaning of who we are and how we got here, like religion or spirituality, and we see everything that happens to us through the lens of that meaning. Other times it goes the other way, we start with all the things that happen to us and we make stories about it until meaning comes out the other side, so blue is meaning and story and that’s amazing!”
Tyler had no more idea what the hell she was talking about than the rest of us, but she hugged him anyway. “From now on, you are my good luck charm!” she said, then turned and whooped! her way down the aisle.
“I got to the pickup spot an hour early,” Tyler said, “because I didn’t want to risk missing the bus. She was early too.”
“How early?” I asked.
“Fifty-eight minutes,” he said, and the look on his face said everything we needed to know about that hour.
~ ... with moar fascinating backstories (note: Tyler has Eisenmenger syndrome, which keeps him constantly tired):
I didn’t have many friends growing up because hello, blue, so I didn’t date much. Only reason I made it to prom with a girl from social studies class was because she was afraid I’d fall over dead if she said no. Had another date in my freshman year at UPenn. I think she was trying to show how open-minded she was, but when she took my hand and it was cold, she shrieked. Literally. She didn’t mean to. Spontaneous reaction. So yeah, no second date on that one.
Never thought I’d get laid, but a year later I met this girl who seemed to like me and said she wasn’t bothered by the blue or the cool skin, and we had sex on our second date. Later, when she didn’t call or return my texts, I found out that the only reason we got together in the first place was that her friends dared her to fuck me because they wanted to find out if my dick was blue. And no, I’m not telling you.
(...) I don’t know if this is the right place to put this—I didn’t see any other tabs for personal information, and to be honest the online interface Mark’s using wasn’t thought through very well—but if anyone should ask after I’m gone, I’d like my headstone to read:
Here Lies
TYLER WESTON
Because Frankly, He’s Exhausted
~ Boisterous fun works even better in contrast with quiet beauty:
“We’ve added a new exhibit.”
I turned to see an older woman standing by the gift shop. “Paperweights. They’re part of the Elizabeth Dengenhart Collection. We don’t get to show them very often, so you came on a good day.” She pointed down the center aisle. “Row seven.”
“Thank you,” I said, and went where directed more out of courtesy than interest. What could be so amazing about paperweights?
But they were beautiful. Hundreds of glass spheres containing butterflies and flowers and swirls of color like little galaxies. Others were shaped like crystal hammers, owls, cats, purses, tiny glass shoes, and figurines. I smiled as I walked down the row of glass cabinets, taking in their beauty. Not just beauty, trivial beauty. A paperweight was designed to do one thing: keep pieces of paper from blowing away. Literally a thing to put on top of a thing. You could use a rock to do that, or your keys, or a pen, or a million other mundane everyday items. Instead, someone decided to create little moments of beauty to do the simplest, smallest job in the world, because why shouldn’t that be beautiful?
For some reason, that thought made me ridiculously happy.
By the time I got back to the bus, everyone else was already on board, waiting for me. “We were starting to get worried,” Dylan said, and grinned at me. “You okay?”
“I’m good,” I said.
And I was.
~ Ah. My soulmate in the book is the craziest one (at least so far):
Two in the morning. Crazy Lisa’s finally gone to sleep and now it’s just me. God, she makes me—what, crazy? So we’re both nuts?
No. At least not literally. I mean, I’m not schizoid or whatever they call it, it’s not like there are a bunch of different personalities in here, it’s not Crazy Lisa and Quiet Lisa and the Sandman and Randy the Meat Puppet. There’s just the two of us, the same person but with different minds, I guess. That’s what being bipolar/manic depressive is all about.
I got that diagnosis when I was fourteen and my hormones were all over the place, which is also when the hypersexuality kicked in and Crazy Lisa started fucking everyone in sight. Quiet Lisa kept hoping that some of the older boys (or the men) would say no, that they’d see I was too young and out of control, and try to help me instead of screwing me. But none of them ever did. Chick comes onto a dude, he gets all excited, like he’s some fucking sex god, so he has to slam it in because he’s too full of himself to take the ten seconds to figure out it’s got nothing to do with him and everything to do with me being completely out of my head. Except for the guys I scare off, like Mark. I don’t blame him. I’m scared too. Been scared ever since the world flipped upside down and everything stopped making sense.
And that’s why I’m here, Mark (if you’re reading this, you said you wouldn’t but I don’t trust promises). I’m tired of being scared and out of control. Tired of being zoomed from Lithium to Epitol to Depakene, Loxapine, Haldol… one drug cocktail after another and they don’t work and my hands are constantly shaking and I sleep all the time or I can’t sleep at all. Tired of the endless crying and yelling. Tired of hurting people when I don’t mean to or they don’t deserve it or shit even when they do deserve it like My Stepmother the Bitch because I still hate myself afterward. Tired of feeling useless and stupid and not being able to hold down a job, which means I’m constantly borrowing from people or selling my clothes just to get by, then I end up blowing it all on new clothes when I’m manic because Crazy Lisa thinks that will solve everything and she’s brilliant and somehow she’ll figure out a way to make a million dollars by Thursday but it never happens because she’s Crazy Lisa. (...)
When I’m not all hypered, I spend most of my time sleeping or lying in bed for days, feeling useless and stupid and judged, drowning in credit card bills for things I didn’t want and don’t need and can’t return and all my friends keep saying why can’t you just control yourself like I actually have a choice, and thinking all the time about hurting myself or killing myself.
(Yes, I'm bipolar too. With much more self-control and much less sex drive, though.)
~ And pure sweetness:
Mark sighed like he’d just been asked to donate blood. “Okay, fine. So during my junior year at college, I was dating this girl named Tracy.”
“Nobody cares!” Lisa called out.
“Fuck off,” Karen yelled back. “Keep going, Mark.”
He crossed his arms tighter. “I was taking animal biology to meet my science requirements, and for homework one weekend we had to go to the zoo and monitor different animals, writing down everything they did for a four-hour period. Each of us was assigned a different animal: zebras, chimpanzees, sloths… I got stuck with geckos.
“So when I went to the zoo that Saturday, Tracy came along to keep me company. But it turned out that the only geckos they had were the nocturnal kind that spend their days sleeping. I mean, yeah, sometimes they’ll lick a leaf, or turn around to the sun, but the rest of the time there was just nothing going on.
“But I still had to write it all down, so I’m sitting on this low wall by the lizard cage, and it’s hot, and after a while we’re both sleepy and Tracy leans against my back because there’s nowhere else to lean. And she falls asleep like that, her arms around me from behind, her head on my shoulder, and…”
He frowned and looked off. “I know it sounds stupid, but as I sat there in the warm sun, with her asleep against my back, it was just kind of perfect, you know? I could feel her breath on the back of my neck, real slow and soft, and I didn’t move even though I was cramping up because I didn’t want to wake her, and I thought, y’know, for all the shit that’s going on in my life, for this one moment, everything’s okay, everything’s good, everything’s beautiful.
“So like D said, it wasn’t like this big moment, or a revelation, or looking at some painting and having it blow the back of your head off, it’s just… I was happy, and it was perfect, you know?”
And ... you decide for yourselves:
“Lisa?” Karen called. No reply. “Lisa, come on. You ever had a moment of perfect beauty?”
And from the bunk came a stream of curses and insults so loud, so profane, but so intricately constructed that all we could do was listen in absolute no-kidding awe, like if Notre Dame Cathedral was made entirely of fucks, and it just blasted through the bus, line after line assembled in waves so breathtaking that it would’ve made even the best coder in the business kill himself and it just kept going, rolling and roiling and filling the bus like a big black cloud until we could barely see each other.
It. Was. Amazing.
When she finally stopped, I wasn’t sure if we should applaud or bury her in the desert with a stake through her heart to keep her from rising again.
“Now, that,” Vaughn said, breaking the silence, “that has just become my moment of perfect beauty!”
And everyone laughed. Even Lisa.
~ The sheer diversity of the presentation boosts the delight:
Hi, I’m Audio Recorder!
Tap the icon to start recording.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSIC. LAUNCH LYRICMASTER? Y/N Y
SONG FOUND: CLUSTERFUK, “DRY EYES.” DOWNLOAD? Y/N N
MARK ANTONELLI: Okay, so Barnbirds opened the festival and since we were late getting in we missed a few songs at the start, but most of those were from their new release, they hit all the good songs in the second half.
One of the security guys said there’s seventy-five thousand people here tonight, and they expect a total of two hundred K over the weekend. We’re packed in tits to backs and balls to butts. Frottage paradise. Chicks in rompers, cat-ears, corsets, capes, G-strings, bras, veils and bigfoot fuzzy boots. Guys in glow-in-the-dark tiger shorts, unicorn hoodies, ballet costumes, ninja masks, raver-swing jackets, and for some reason I’m seeing a lot of panda onesies in the crowd. Must be some new anime thing.
I used to think raver costumes were just another kind of cosplay, like dressing up to look like Thor or Scarlet Witch or one of the guys from Mortal Kombat, but when I said that to a girl I was dating last year, she reamed me a new one. She said cosplay is dressing up to look like someone else. Raver wear is about dressing up to look like your real self, the one you can’t let out anywhere else if you want to get a job or a degree. So it’s kind of like they’re wearing the inside on the outside. You’ve got death-metal fairies and—
LISA: Hi! What are you doing?
MARK ANTONELLI: I’m—
LISA: Dance with me!
MARK ANTONELLI: I’m in the middle of—
LISA: You can do that later! Dance with me!
MARK ANTONELLI: In a minute—
VOICE 8: Excuse me, is this your drink?
LISA: Oh, hey, sorry, here, let me—
VOICE 8: I almost tripped over it.
LISA: Thanks.
VOICE 9: Why aren’t you dressed up?
LISA: I am! I’m dressed as a living dead girl!
VOICE 9: You look normal to me, but cool.
VOICE 8: Hey, as shitfaced as I am right now, we’re all living dead, right?
VOICE 9: Living dead Delta Gamma Epsilon!
LISA: Frats!
VOICE 8: Fucking A! All of us, man. Came down in a group.
MARK ANTONELLI: Screw it.
END RECORDING
~ But hey! Bipolar people are
people too!
It was almost dark by the time I was strong enough to step outside.
So of course the first person I saw was Lisa.
She came over to ask if I was okay, and even though I knew that what happened wasn’t her fault, that she was the one who got attacked, I was angry and in pain and I wasn’t thinking right and I totally lit into her.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I yelled. “You never let somebody touch your drink or hand you a cup at one of those things! That’s the rule, you know that!”
“I do! I’m sorry!”
“Don’t fucking I’m sorry me, Lisa! You were out of control! You didn’t give a shit what happened to you or us, or—”
“It wasn’t on purpose, none of it was! When I get like that, I don’t go that far!” She was crying and yelling, not at me but at herself. “It’s like there’s some part of me that thinks she can’t be hurt, that she’s too smart to get roofied, so when he handed me the cup the front of my brain didn’t even think twice and the whole time the back of my brain is screaming, What are you doing?!
“I’m not stupid!” she said, fists balled up and crying hard. “When I get manic it’s like I can’t see something dangerous when it’s right in front of me, or I just don’t care! I mean, shit, nobody else does, so why should I? And I’m sorry you’re in pain and Tyler got screwed up! I’m sorry about all of it! It’s tearing me apart and I can’t stand being in my own skin anymore and if there’s anyone who can understand what that feels like it’s got to be you or I am completely fucking alone here!”
“You’re not alone, you asshole!” I said, and I realized I was crying too. “None of us are! That’s the whole reason we’re doing this! So we don’t have to be alone, so we can rely on each other! We do care about you!”
“Bullshit! I’ve seen the way you look at me. I piss you off!”
“Oh, hell yeah. Hugely. Like all the time. You’re a jerk, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care.”
“I’m not a jerk!”
I just stared at her.
“I’m not,” she said, and laughed. “I’m just fucked in the head, that’s all. I’m nutty as squirrel shit.”
~ And this is ... damn.
This is the second time I’ve tried to write about what happened at the festival. I spent most of my first attempt blaming Crazy Lisa, writing about how she’s acting out and getting more and more reckless. Sane Lisa never would’ve let someone she didn’t know handle her drink, but Crazy Lisa did it because like I told Karen she thinks she’s way too smart to fall for something like that so the drink couldn’t be drugged and even if it is there’s nothing left to lose, so why the fuck not? And everybody had to pay for her choice.
So yeah, that’s what I said and that’s what I wrote, and it’s bullshit. I need to accept that there is no Crazy Lisa and no Sane Lisa, no Loud Lisa and no Quiet Lisa, there’s Just Lisa. Having “her” to blame for my stupid choices made it easier to live with whatever shit followed. It’s the lie that helps me keep going. Well, we’re heading for the end now and I don’t want to keep lying anymore.
The truth is that I’m fucked up. I’m making bad choices. I’m out of control. Not her. Me.
This is
hard.
Sometimes, it's even true.
~
Guys! I finally know what I am!
Most of my friends put their preferred pronoun in their Instagram bios—he/she, him/her, they/their—but I respond to any and all of them. I like to think of it as collecting pronouns: the more I get, the more fun I’m having. To get the obvious out of the way, because that’s apparently important to people, I think of myself as post-gender. I was trying to figure out how to explain that because sometimes it’s a paragraph and sometimes it’s a term paper depending on who I’m talking to, and I have no idea who will be reading this in the aftermath. Then I noticed that one of my fellow passengers has a cat with him, and that’s perfect.
When you visit a friend and find they have a cat, you just see it as a cat in all its pure catness, it doesn’t require further definition. You’ll probably get a name, and if you ask, whether it was born male or female, but even after you have that information you still don’t think of it any differently. It’s not a He-Cat or a She-Cat or a They-Cat. It’s just a cat. And unless the cat’s name has any gender-specific connotations you’ll probably forget pretty fast which gender it was born into.
My name is Theo, and by that logic, I am a cat.
What I was or was not born into has nothing to do with how I see myself. It’s not about going from one gender to another, or suggesting that they don’t exist. Some of my friends say that the moment you talk about gender you invalidate the conversation because you’re accepting the limits of outmoded paradigms, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I just think gender shouldn’t matter.
If you’re a man, aren’t there moments when you feel more female, like when you’re listening to music, or your cheek is being gently stroked, or you see a spectacularly handsome man walk into the room? If you’re a woman, aren’t there moments when you feel more male, when you have to be strong in the face of conflict, or stand behind your opinion, or when a spectacularly beautiful woman walks into the room? Well, in those moments, you are all of those things, so why deny that part of yourself?
For me, it’s not about being binary or non-binary. It’s about moving the needle to the center of the dial and accepting all definitions as equally true while remaining free to shift in emphasis from moment to moment. It’s about being a Person, not a She-Person or a He-Person or a They-Person.
(...) When you go into a clothing store, you don’t just go to the “one size fits all” rack. You look for clothes that fit your waist, hips, legs, chest, and neck, clothes that complement your form and shape, and reflect not just how you see yourself but how you want to be seen by others. If it’s still not quite right, and you can afford it, you get the clothes tailored to fit exactly who you are.
That’s what I’m doing. Post-gender is one term for it. Another might be tailored gender. Maybe bespoke gender. But definitely not one-size-fits-all. The world doesn’t get to decide what best fits who I am and how I choose to be seen. I do.
~ How do people commit suicide?
At risk of overthinking everything—and as someone who got a BA in Gender Studies and made it halfway through the Master’s program for Political Theory, that’s apparently something I do all the time—I think there are two ways that people commit suicide.
The first way people kill themselves is a kind of spontaneous combustion. It comes out of rage or shock or sudden deep depression and catches you by surprise, and before you even realize you’re doing it, you’re reaching for the gun or the knife or the pills. It’s as if something inside you gets too sad or too angry to survive anymore and it explodes, taking you with it. I think it happens most often to the very people who don’t think they could ever kill themselves, because they’re not paying attention when their switch gets flipped in the middle of something awful.
The second is more like a time-delay fuse. It comes when you’ve been wounded for days or weeks or years and you finally reach a point when your heart gets very quiet and very still and you realize that you simply cannot live in the world anymore, when you say, I have no purpose here, no place, no function, no reason to keep going. Why stick around when you’re not free to be yourself, you’re not wanted, your future isn’t what you thought it was going to be and every day you’re being elbowed a little further off the planet? It’s not that you can’t take it anymore, it’s that you refuse to take it anymore. The decision doesn’t come like a lightning bolt out of anger, despair, or self-pity; it’s more like standing up on your hind legs and announcing to the world, You’re all a bunch of assholes and I never asked to be invited to this stupid party in the first place so I’m outta here.
~ Love:
I remembered the day I went out to score some party favors and left the door open by accident. We were squatting in this abandoned apartment, no water or heat but it had a roof and walls and that was all we needed. I hadn’t had Soldier very long and he was always looking out the window like he wanted to go for a walk. It was a pretty rough area, so I kept the door closed so he wouldn’t wander out and get grabbed or lost or hurt, but this one time I was withdrawing pretty hard so I was kind of spaced and not paying attention so I forgot to close the door when I went out.
When I came back and saw the door open, my heart just sank. I ran inside, figuring by now he was long gone, but there he was, sitting in his favorite spot, right where I left him, front legs tucked under his chest, really calm, just looking at me like, Of course I wouldn’t leave, as if I could’ve gone away for five years, and he’d still be sitting there when I came back, waiting for me. And I realized how any time I left the room, wherever he was when I left was where he was when I came back. Whenever we went for a walk, he always stayed beside me, never getting too far behind or ahead, so I’d always know he was right there.
And I finally got the message.
Soldier didn’t need to show me all the time that he loved me. He knew it and I knew it and that’s that. What he was doing was giving me a safe place to put my own love.
It’s like he was saying, I’m never going to leave you. I’ll wait for you. I want you to know that I’ll always wait for you, that it’s safe to love me, that you have a place to put all the feelings you can’t give to anybody else because it’s too dangerous, because you’re worried they won’t understand, and they won’t wait for you. I’m here. I love you. And I will wait for you. I’m not going anywhere.
And I just started crying.
That’s why I can’t let him die alone. I can’t let him go too far ahead of me, or fall too far behind me. We walk together. When he gets to the other side, he’ll wait for me until I come to pick him up and hold him. And I don’t want him to wait a minute longer than he has to.
It’s love that put us on the road, Mark, or whoever’s reading this. Love is what put us on the bus, and love is what’s going to carry me and Soldier across to someplace where we can play forever.
Crazy, huh?
~ After the following section, I think I understand people who get riled up when I introduce myself through my bipolar a bit better:
So now I’m feeling even more like a stick in the mud with a baseball bat (which I guess makes it two sticks in the mud) as I walk around looking for something to hit even though I don’t much feel like hitting anything. (...)
Then I see it, beside the entrance to a clothing store.
A full-length mirror.
A blue full-length mirror, with me right in the middle, blue on blue.
I don’t attack it. I don’t break it. I don’t raise the baseball bat and smash my reflection into a million pieces because I’m not that much of a cliché, okay?
Instead of me hitting the mirror, everything I see in the mirror hits me.
The shopping mall is blue in the reflection.
The stores are blue, the baseball bat is blue, Lisa beating the shit out of Ronald McDonald is blue. Both of them are blue. All of it is blue.
And I realize that I’ve been looking at the world through this blue filter ever since I got diagnosed. When I meet someone for the first time, I explain why I look this way before even saying my name. My illness actually walks into the room before me. It’s bad enough that I let it take center stage, defining and literally coloring every relationship and conversation. What’s worse is that I’ve been using it as an excuse to hold back, so I don’t have to engage with other people, so I can stay stuck inside my own self-limiting self-pity… the illness won’t let me do this, the illness won’t let me do that, the illness might not let me get all the way to San Francisco… hiding so far inside the blue that my whole world looks like this mirror, and yeah, okay, on reflection (ha!) maybe that is an obvious metaphor, maybe I am a cliché, and maybe all of that has been obvious to everybody else, but I never had that thought before because there are some things you never really understand until it’s five seconds to midnight.
I’ve been doing it all backwards, like I’m the disease that’s living in this body instead of a body that has to live with a disease. I’ve been quiet when I should have roared, even if that meant coughing up blood; I’ve sat silently while others walked or danced instead of running flat-out even if it meant falling over dead because at least I would have done something instead of letting the disease define me.
~ Can you say no?
I turned back to Vaughn. “Want to dance?”
“I can’t.”
“Your leg broke?”
“No, I just… I don’t know how to dance the way you dance.”
“Black girls dance same as any other girl, with our feet on the floor and our hearts in our heads.”
“I wasn’t talking about that,” he said, and he looked kind of hurt. “I mean I dance like an old fart dances, not like the way everybody your age dances.”
“Then dance like that,” I said. “You do you, I’ll do me, and we’ll meet in the middle.”
“We’ll look silly.”
“Yeah, I know. It’ll be great.”
Took me about two minutes of dancing around him before the smile finally came back a little, and he danced with me.
Nobody says no to a sunny disposition… and lives! LOL
~ The contrasts hit like sledgehammers:
We’d just finished working this out when I saw Jim standing behind me. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
“You already are,” I said. “What’s up?”
“What happened back at the mall, that wasn’t right, man.”
“I agree. We can’t have that kind of infighting going on.”
He nodded for a moment, then glanced over his shoulder to where Theresa was standing by the river. She put him up to this. Doesn’t want to do her own dirty work.
“Yeah,” he said, “and that’s why we think you need to choose whether you want Lisa to stay on the bus or us.”
Even Dylan looked surprised. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, look, there’s just one of her and two of us, so we kind of outvote her, and we bring a lot to the table. Theresa’s got tons of credit cards if we get in trouble, I’m good with repairs… from what we can see, all Lisa does is yell and make trouble.”
“She was here first.”
“Yes, she was,” Jim said like it shouldn’t matter. “Meanwhile, Theresa’s tired and upset, so we’re gonna wait in the bus while the rest of you do whatever you’re gonna do because it’s best to keep Lisa and us apart at this point.”
“Okay,” I said, “let me think it over and get back to you when we’re not in the middle of things.”
“I appreciate that, because it’s real important to keep Theresa on the bus because—”
Whatever he said after that got lost because at that moment all I could hear was Zeke.
I’ve never heard any man cry out like that. Not even my grandfather when his brother died. There was just this awful sound coming from way down deep inside him, loss and pain and anguish and sadness, and he was rocking back and forth, his face pressed into Soldier’s fur. Ever since he’d gotten on the bus, he’d always been smiling, just goofy Zeke and his secret cat, and now he was broken right down the middle and no one knew what to do about it. Then Karen knelt down next to him and put an arm around his shoulders. Theo was next, then Lisa and me and the rest. Zeke was quiet-crying now, but once in a while a sharp Ah! slipped out, like his soul was trying to catch its breath.
Everyone was crying. It didn’t make any sense. We came on this trip to die, we’re okay with dying. But there we were, crying with a guy we barely knew, because something he loved more than anything else in the world had just died, leaving him alone in ways all of us could understand.
~ Tanatos and Eros, hand in hand (or at least hand on, umm...):
When I opened my eyes again, I was spooned behind Dylan, my left arm under his head. Careful not to wake him, I peeked past him to the bedside clock: 7:45 a.m. He’d set the alarm for eight. So I had fifteen minutes to make this happen.
I reached around and lightly stroked his chest. I guess army guys learn how to shut out the world when they sleep because he didn’t even move. Okay, challenge accepted. I let my hand drift south until it slipped beneath his shorts. I’d never touched a penis before, and I was surprised by how soft it felt. They were always so rock hard in porn that it never occurred to me it could be this soft and velvety. I felt a thrill go through me, like an explorer who had just discovered a whole new country.
Then it twitched, and I knew Dylan was awake.
“What are you doing?” he asked without turning around, his voice low.
“What does it feel like I’m doing?”
“We had an agreement.”
“Yes, we did,” I said, but didn’t remove my hand. “We agreed nothing could happen last night. It’s not night anymore.”
“Still, we probably shouldn’t do this.”
Aha! He said probably! His dick finally got his brain on the line.
~ Another reason why there
must be one:
“So do you believe in God, or an afterlife?” he asked.
That settled it. We were definitely at the stoned part of the conversation.
“No on both counts. I think the whole afterlife thing is just the bullshit we grab on to when we get old because we’re afraid of dying.”
“Not sure that’s true.”
“Come on, even you have to concede that one.”
“Not really,” he said. “See, everybody I ever knew who was old and dying—my grandparents, a couple of teachers I had when I was a kid, the drill instructor who trained me and came down with brain cancer—were okay with it at the end. They never talked about being afraid to die. They talked about how great it would be to see their old friends again, about how they were looking forward to being reunited with their parents, husbands, and wives on the other side of this life. When somebody dies, we miss them, and that feeling never really goes away. We just keep on missing them. The longer you live, the more of people you miss, until the idea of dying is less about Oh, shit, I’m afraid and more about I’ll finally be able to see all my friends again… everyone I’ve missed so much.
“So no, I don’t think it’s the fear of death that makes us believe in an afterlife. It’s our love for everybody we ever lost.”
~ Why do people commit suicide?
“I was thinking about the whole suicide thing—”
“I don’t want to talk about that right now, not on our last night—”
“I don’t either, but it’s important,” he said, and sat up a little. “See, I think the reason people kill themselves—”
“One of the reasons. We’re all different, we don’t lie down in rows.”
“—is because they think they’re never going to be happy again, that every day is going to be miserable and awful and lonely and painful and they might as well check out because there’s no chance they’ll ever be happy.”
“Okay, fair. So?”
He looked at me with eyes so intense I could feel them burrowing right through mine and scratching at the other side of my skull to see what was back there. “Are you happy, right now? With us?”
“Dylan, come on, don’t do this.”
“I’m just asking. Are you happy… with me, and us, right here, right now?”
“Of course I am. I love you. I never thought that would happen to me, or that it could happen this fast, and maybe it’s because I don’t have time, but… yes, I love you and I’m happy when I’m with you.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“You mean the vote?”
“No, leave all that aside, I’m just talking about us. Do you think there’s a chance, just a chance, that for ten minutes tomorrow you could be happy with us being together, like this?”
“Dylan—”
“Five. Five minutes. Do you think you could be happy for five minutes?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Why?”
“Because if it’s possible, then maybe you should think twice about tomorrow.”
~ Why do we write or read stories like this one?
I opened the archive and pulled out the quote. “ ‘The first way people kill themselves is a kind of spontaneous combustion. It comes out of rage or shock or sudden deep depression and catches you by surprise, and before you even realize you’re doing it, you’re reaching for the gun or the knife or the pills. It’s as if something inside you gets too sad or too angry to survive anymore and it explodes, taking you with it. I think it happens most often to the very people who don’t think they could ever kill themselves, because they’re not paying attention when their switch gets flipped in the middle of something awful.’
“Theo’s right. The reason so many people are vulnerable to suicide is because they think it could never happen to them, so they don’t know what to look for, what feelings could lead to making that decision. But the archive is full of all of us talking about why we decided to check out early, the whole thought process is right there, so anybody reading this will know exactly what it feels like to make that choice from the inside out. For some people maybe it’ll be like a flu vaccine, giving them a little piece of the real thing so it immunizes them, so they’ll know what that impulse feels like when it comes, and maybe they won’t be as vulnerable because now they can recognize that feeling for what it is instead of being ambushed by it. And maybe they won’t make that jump, or at least they’ll know enough to wait and think about it some more. (...)”
~ And finally, where am I? What do I think~feel about killing myself?
There's no brief (and satisfying) answer. For now, let me just say that I have never been in so much pain as most of the characters here. Waiting for those five minutes of happiness--the hell with happiness, of
purpose--has been relatively easy, even when I've waded across ten months of emptiness.
I don't know what I'd do if the pain reaches Spider levels.
Also, I do believe in an afterlife. One with a nasty catch: if little me takes a shortcut that Big Me doesn't find satisfying, we'll be back, rinse and repeat. (Of course, there's a nice catch too: Big Me is smarter and more forgiving than little me, so Ze can find satisfaction in a
lot of choices.)
The rest is
here, in Bulgarian.
