Love in Real Life

by Seth King

  The death of a family member was the great Changer. Before, you were one person, with one identity. After, your whole life was rearranged. Before her death I was Teddy, son of Karen and Todd. After her death I was just the son of Todd. Three became two, and I became someone else. The spilled blood of a family member stained everyone around.

  George just reached over and wrapped me up again, and I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Before I even knew I was crying, I was crying. And soon I didn’t feel like me anymore. I just felt water falling down my cheeks, soaking my shirt, and him holding me, and me never wanting the holding to let go. I felt like a rag doll that had come apart – it was like the strings holding me together had evaporated at once. I knew I would always remember the smell of his shoulder, the soft purr of his voice, as he tried and failed to hold me together.

  To avoid the elephant in the corner I told him something I’d never told anyone before, about how I’d once stumbled upon texts from my first boyfriend to his brother, saying he “couldn’t even get hard” in bed with me because I was “so fucking boring.” I’d dropped the phone, my mouth open and my eyes horrified. If I’d felt insecure before, I felt absolutely worthless after. Ever since then I’d totally blamed myself for failing to keep him. If only I’d tried harder, if only I’d made myself into someone that could please him, I wouldn’t have made him leave. I never felt handsome again.

  Then I cried harder. Something was opening inside me and I couldn’t stop it. So I told him of the big thing, the real reason I couldn’t forgive my mother. The thing I’d never even revealed to anyone, not even myself, really.

  As I spoke, long-lost details starting blooming in my brain, details and memories I didn’t even know I’d retained. I told him of the night when my mother had a raging party in the kitchen during her separation from my father. I told him of this big biker woman, Patsy, who wandered into my room after everyone had left or passed out. I told him of how she’d called me handsome the first time she’d ever seen me a few months before, but in a way that was leery instead of sweet, in a way that made me feel ashamed and uncomfortable and itchy. She was perfectly nice the next time, though, and so I let her sit on the couch with me as I watched SNL. More red flags followed; my mom seemed bizarrely unaware of her new friend’s behavior. She kept asking me to trust her – she’d bring me extra-soft cookies for no reason, and then laugh nervously and tell me not to tell anyone. This was just between us friends, she’d say. Just us. At the time I thought she was being nice, but she wasn’t being nice.

  She was grooming me.

  When I woke up that night to find her hand in my shorts, the blue shorts with the drawstring, I was so disgusted and confused that I just laid there motionless for a moment and then projectile vomited onto her chest. She ran out, and I never saw her again. As I continued talking to George, I started remembering even more details I’d suppressed, details I’d never even admitted to myself: the way she smelled like cheap Kmart body spray as she did the thing; the way I kept staring at the fan as it spun, begging it to suck me up and take it away. Those memories were my burden to bear, my price to pay for her sins.

  I told George of how this woman had ended my childhood; taken something from me that I didn’t even know I had until it was gone. In one night I went from careless child to weary adult, except it wasn’t by choice. That woman had burdened me with her pain, her shame, forever. I hated her. And sometimes I thought I would feel dirty and unworthy forever.

  “So much of me disappeared after that,” I finished blankly. “Disappeared straight into my books. She took so much of me with her. I made the biggest mistake ever with trusting my parents to be good people and raise me well, so now I don’t trust myself or my own judgment anymore. And if I can’t trust myself, who the hell can I trust? How can I love when my love parts are broken?”

  For a long while he just stared, bug-eyed. “My God,” he finally said. “Have you ever told anyone this? About the lady, I mean?”

  “Well, yeah, my mom knew something was wrong with me, and one night I broke down and told her.”

  “And?”

  “And she left the house that minute to go track that pig down, but she’d already left town. I had to beg her to drop it after that because…because I was a kid. I didn’t want anyone finding out. I was terrified. Disgusted.”

  He swallowed. I could hear anger when he spoke. “Okay. What happened after that?”

  “Nothing. My mom acted like it never happened. And the woman is dead now. I heard she got high and drove her Harley into a tractor-trailer a few years ago. So is my mom.”

  He stared at me. I wiped my nose.

  “What’s with the look? What are they going to do, prosecute a grave?”

  “No, that’s not the point. That bitch at the party tried to ruin love for you.”

  “Huh?”

  He shook his head like I was an idiot. Maybe I was. “Don’t you get it? Love is dirty to you because someone you trusted ended up betraying you. So you feel dirty whenever someone tries to love you. I don’t understand abuse, but I do understand damage. You think you don’t deserve it. You think you’re too small for something so big. But love isn’t dirty. Love is so clean. I hoped I could teach you that one day.”

  “God, you are. Trust me. You are. Don’t walk away yet. Despite everything. Despite all this.” But did I want him to walk away? Was I defeating myself once again?

  “I’m not. But Theodore, you were assaulted. You need to tell a therapist or something.”

  “I’m…okay with it, I guess,” I said, and I sounded so unconvincing I had to cringe. “She was a disgusting creep, and karma got her eventually. I’m just so angry at my mom for putting me in that situation. How can I not be angry at her? And what do I do with that emotion?”

  “Jesus,” he sighed soon. “And I thought my life was complicated.”

  “Sometimes,” I said unsteadily, “I feel filthy even to be named after her. Her last name was Phannopolous…”

  He sighed again, then smiled a little. “Teddy. You shouldn’t. She’s your mother, and she’s the only mother you’ll ever have. Isn’t it kind of cool? Your whole life, only one person will ever be your mother – and that’s her. You got to love her through her darkest times, and she will always be your mom. She gets that job forever. You’re only going to punish yourself by punishing her. All that shit will only run downhill.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because my recovery started the day I forgave myself for being crazy, accepted the fact that I would never be totally healed, and decided to just take it day by day. The worst acts of violence, according to my therapist, are the ones we commit against ourselves. And they will kill.”

  I just sniffled as his words rained down on me. He was right. He was so right.

  “Tell me more,” he said, falling against me. “Tell me everything. You’re so close to me now. I want to be closer. Tell me all about her.”

  And soon the strangest thing started happening: I started talking about my mom. And not the bad parts, but the good ones. All my life I’d recoiled at even the slightest mention of her, but now the gates were falling apart. She wasn’t just bad – she’d done so many good things, too. I told him a story about how I fell down the stairs one time behind the house while playing with the neighbor, and I had to act as the chief Native American in my school’s Thanksgiving play the next day with two huge black eyes. Mom was right there in the front row, though, clapping and screaming for me, and I could remember seeing tears in her eyes. She was probably hung over as shit at the time, but you know what? She was there. She was trying. For me.

  I kept talking and talking and talking. And thinking, too, underneath. Now that I knew how hard it was to simply be alive, I was starting to realize that nothing was ever as simple as I’d assumed. It was never simple. It was life. And maybe that was Mom, too. Maybe she’d just been too complicated…

  And as I shared more, I felt better and better. That was the thing abou
t letting yourself remember – once you started, the good times started floating up. And if I kept trying, with George’s direction, maybe one day the good memories would overtake the bad ones. Maybe.

  “God,” I sighed after telling the story about how she’d dropped me and accidentally cut my elbow while trying to play airplane with me. Looking back, I would get that cut again, a million times over, just to see her again, just to smell her again, just to hug her again. “Living is so dangerous. And exhausting. Is it bad that I’m fighting a very strong urge right now to run home and get lost in my bookshelves again?”

  “Yes,” he smiled. “But understandable. Living sucks – I get it. Life is hard – that’s why it’s life. It has to be lived to be learned. And avoidance is safe, but yeah…it’s basically death, and you don’t come back from that. You don’t get a second try at this thing. There is no alternative, so I guess we’d might as well figure out what the hell we’re doing down here while we can. I’m trying every day, that’s for damned sure.”

  On my face, I felt a smile bloom at him. I knew the moment was coming, so I just decided to get it over with. “So, yeah, I’m clearly a mess because of all this repressed grief. I knew it was there, but I pushed it deep. But I’m also kind of infatuated with you,” I said in a shaking voice, and his eyes met mine. Here it was – the moment where I had to put everything on the table and see what happened. “Despite everything. And I know this is only supposed to happen in books. You were only supposed to happen in books. But, yeah, I’m guilty of liking you. I’m not going to give you the whole book spiel, though, like the characters do in the romance novels, and tell you that I wake up thinking about you and go to sleep smiling about you, and that I spend the whole day in between daydreaming about you and hoping my life contains you in five, ten, fifteen years. So I won’t say any of that, because this isn’t a book. But I like you, and that is so real.”

  With a tear in his eye, he smirked. “Would any of that be true, though, if you did say it?”

  I nodded, then looked away. “Every last word.”

  “Okay, well, I won’t do the book speech, either,” he said. “I won’t say I love you, and I won’t say I’ve loved you in my own little way since the first moment I saw you. And that you are my happy place now. But I won’t say that. Because this isn’t a book.”

  “God,” I said. “We’re so dumb. And annoying.”

  “You’re not annoying. You’re perfect. I’m sorry for what the world’s done to you,” he said as the sky started getting lighter over the pool. “If I could, I would kill them all. But that would land me in jail, if I went to jail I wouldn’t be able to kiss you and touch you and obsess over you.”

  “I’m glad we’re dating,” I said simply.

  “We’re not dating. That all sounds so childish. You’re my best friend in the world, with whom I also want to have sex.”

  “What are we, then?”

  “We’re…sweethearts,” he smiled after a short pause.

  “Okay, Frank Sinatra…”

  “No, I’m serious. I like that word. Life is just sweeter with you.”

  “Okay then, sweetheart.”

  “Okay then, sweetheart,” he repeated. “Wow. Now at least I know why you would always sigh when we got close like this.”

  I sighed again. “Yeah. I kind of hated the person you made me become. I can’t lie. I felt like a heartsick loser from a book. You were so gorgeous and cute and smart and it really made me just want to die. Or cuddle with a pile of puppies and let them lick my face all day – either one. Death or puppies, there was no in between with you. Because in the end, liking you meant I was just creating another chance for me to be let down, disappointed...”

  “Stop,” he said, smiling that death/puppy smile. “I’m okay, but I’m not worth all that.”

  “You are. And that’s the weirdest part. You are so worth it.” I sigh again. “It’s crazy, because I didn’t think anybody out there could want me. Nobody ever comes knocking on this door.”

  “Well I’m breaking it down right now, and you locked it for so long it. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Sad, is more like it. And I’m working on it, I swear. I just came with some factory defects.”

  He smiled at me like I didn’t have to work for it, like I would never have to work for it. And then I realized: I wouldn’t. I was so sick having to earn love. I was so sick of having to beg my grandpa to want to drop by for Easter dinner, to beg strangers to like my Instagram posts, to beg guys to like me back and want to hang out with me. But George simply smiled and offered himself to me, as-is, no strings attached, asking for nothing in return – and in doing that, he opened me up to the whole world.

  Because giving love was one thing – receiving it was another concept altogether. And I wasn’t perfect, but I was getting better. I was like a gas station at night – all I had to do was stay open. And soon I would receive his love, if he was still willing to give it to me. I was sure of it.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said. “Are you going to look at me differently now? After this big…drama explosion?”

  “Yes,” he said. “To be honest. Because you are so much better, so much braver, than I knew. I hope you know that it’s not your fault, and that you’re still treasure to me, no matter that anyone else has ever done to you.”

  “Ugh.”

  “What?”

  “I just hate you for making me need you sometimes. Everyone I ever needed has let me down and made a mess of me. But I’m just going to have to deal with that on my own.”

  “I don’t want to stop. I’m not going to. This thing has already been written.” He paused. The crickets sang into the silence as we breathed. “I already knew, by the way. That you were…you know, abused.”

  “How?”

  “Something in the way you held your hands – it’s like you were defending yourself. Someone hurt you, I guessed. I just never suspected it would’ve been…that bas of a situation, exactly, though.”

  I let out a long breath.

  “She loved you,” he said soon. “Do you know how much she loved you? You were her son. And just put yourself in her shoes. She was almost your age when she had you, according to the math you mentioned. Just think about how hard adulting is for you, every day. Think of all the mistakes you make. Think of how lost everyone is. Now imagine putting a child into that situation and tell me you wouldn’t fuck up a few times, too.”

  “Wow,” I said soon. “I can’t imagine it, actually. I can barely manage my own life, much less someone else’s. And I think I’m actually older than she was when she got pregnant with me. Even my poor guinea pig died after a few months because I didn’t know how take care of it, as terrible as that makes me sound.”

  I thought about all the good things she’d done for me, before the booze and drugs took her away. Like how she would take me to Dairy Queen for a dipped cone every single day after school, and like how she always set out a totally cute outfit for me every morning, and would always remember never to include the color orange because I refused to wear it. She did so much for me before she fell. And for the first time in my life, I felt bad for her. She had a disease of the brain – addiction. Just like George. And my dad was so poor, and his weight was completely out of control, and my mom must’ve been under so much stress financially, being dead broke all the time…

  “Looking back,” I said, “I can kind of feel it. I can sort of see it. I never really did before, though. I never accepted it. I never let it in.”

  “God, let me tell you. If I sat and thought of all the ways people let me down, I would never get over it. But you know what? I will never change anything that happened. And all I can do is accept reality as it happens. Nothing else.”

  I thought about that for a minute.

  “Where do you think she is now?” he asked. “What are your thoughts on all that?”

  “I don’t know. But I know where I hope she is. Inside some version of happiness. Even despite everythi
ng, I hope she’s without the things that kept her down when I was alive, all the anxiety and the sadness, the way her eyes always used to pull toward the beer shelf in the refrigerator, no matter what time of day it was. I hope she’s the younger version of herself, the one I only remember glimpses of, the one that laughed all the way down to her stomach and didn’t have lines digging into her face. There’s this gazebo she used to love, over on a lake in Jarboe Park, surrounded by oak trees – that’s where I hope she is. In the gazebo, happy. She deserves it. God, she deserves so much…”

  And the willows sang for us.

  “What would you say to her, if you saw her now?”

  I sighed again, then took a swallow of wine from his glass. “That I forgive her. Or want to, at least. That I’m trying to understand. And that I wish I could’ve been more important to her than the alcohol. But that it’s okay. I’m okay.”

  “You know what’s weird? For the first time, I believe you.”

  I laughed.

  “But seriously, it’s love. You’re not supposed to understand it. You’re just supposed to give into it.”

  “God,” I said, “who talks like this?”

  “I do, apparently.”

  “Can you help me write a letter to her?” I ask suddenly.

  “Sure.” He sucks in some air. “Well, actually, the thing is, maybe-”

  “No,” I said, standing up. “On second thought, I might never again be sitting here, so close to her grave, with a really smart dude. You’re helping.”

  ~

  After spending over an hour pouring my heart out into a letter, we drove to the cemetery drenched in a warm silence. I didn’t know if I was dreading the sight of her name in stone, or thrilled about it. Sometimes I did want her here, just so I could hug her – and then get right in front of her face, stare into her brown eyes, and force her to look at the mess she’d made, acknowledge the girl she’d left, who now left everyone else as a coping mechanism.