Love in Real Life

by Seth King

  Miss Sharon, the group leader, also had a history in dealing with depression, and she became a gift from the clouds. She taught me that of course I’d sought out toxicity and abuse in the form of my first boyfriend – if a child was taught that love was bad and dirty, Miss Sharon said, they’d seek to replicate that dynamic for the rest of their lives. So I’d chased his dirty love. She loved the idea of George, though, and I suspected she’d run me over with her car if I ever fucked it up with him. For the first time, I was getting to know the guy in my front-facing camera. Slowly but surely Miss Sharon was helping me cure my damage.

  She was also guiding me through treatment for what she said was clinical depression – apparently, I’d been so depressed my whole life, I was too numb inside to even know I was depressed. I didn’t even realize things could get better until they actually got better and made me realize how dead I’d been. George had shocked me back to life in an extremely literal sense.

  According to her, humans hurt each other. That’s what they all inevitably did. All you had to do was find someone who was worth the burn. And was I sad, on some level, for good? Yes. My mom was dead and that would never change. But it was okay to be sad sometimes, and I was learning that.

  Slowly, I was unwrapping everything I’d hidden within myself, and before long, half of me thought I didn’t even blame my mother for my assault anymore. She should’ve protected me, sure. But she didn’t. Sometimes fire fell from the sky and changed everything you knew. Look at George and his mental issues. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t wash yourself off and emerge, damaged but clean again. And that’s what I was doing, with the help of my father and Miss Sharon and my books and, above all, George.

  Three weeks before Halloween he went to North Carolina for a family reunion. I got a text from my dad: emergency. Meet me in the extra room upstairs, the one across from your bedroom. We still hadn’t figured out what to do with all the bedrooms in our rambling apartment quarters, and I burst in expecting to find my dad having another heart attack – but instead I found George. The bare walls had been covered in shelves, the floor had been covered in a deep-blue rug, and all of my favorite books and posters were staring right at me.

  “What is this?” I asked. “You came back early?”

  “Never left,” he smiled as his delicious smell attacked my nostrils. “Remember when you told you that if I wanted to get serious, I’d need to build you a bookshelf? I did. A whole room full.”

  “Oh my God,” I said as I ran to him and hugged him with my whole body. “It’s perfect! But what can I get you?”

  “Well, right now I need two things. One can be acquired in the pastry section of the Meow. The other I would like to do in your shower with you. Just don’t lose your ring this time. Oh, and guess what else? We chose a big room because it needed room for meetings.”

  “Meetings?”

  He took out his iPad and showed me a Facebook group – Teddy and George’s Invisible Illness Society. He explained he was making a group for people suffering from ailments the world couldn’t see – depression, anxiety, suicidal wishes, the list went on and on. He’d already signed up six people, and apparently the bookshelf room would be where we’d meet whenever we wanted to talk in person. I could tell he was nervous about my reaction, and he should’ve been – I burst into tears, right then and there. He was changing the world, one person at a time. Starting with me.

  Pain was like a pen exploding onto the page of the book. If you didn’t turn that page, the ink would bleed onto the rest of the story and blot your whole entire life. No matter how hard it was, you had to turn the page. You had to stop the bleeding. Over the years I convinced myself that I wasn’t good enough, so I had to pretend to be someone else. Everything was situated around maintaining that false persona, because if I ever let my guard down and revealed the mess within, I was sure that everyone would walk away and abandon me. But in Key West I showed George the worst of me, and he didn’t care. He looked me in the eye and accepted me. And that made all the difference.

  All my life I’d felt like a child inside, but now I could almost feel myself getting older, bit by bit – it was the strangest thing. Every day I was having to make decisions about who I was going to be, what I was going to do, what kind of life I was going to live, and that meant I was already mourning all the choices I’d never made, all the doors I’d ever closed. It seemed that life was a constant dance between what you were, what you weren’t, and what you wanted to be, and I felt I had the rhythm of a drunken great-aunt at someone’s wedding. But I was getting there. I just had to learn, against all odds, to love this set of bones I’d been given before it was too late and my train hit the last stop. All I had to do was accept myself, or pretend to accept myself until fantasy became reality – the rest of this mess called life would fall together after that. It had to.

  George was still somewhat of a mystery, though. A perfect mystery, with dark eyes and wavy hair. Sometimes he had setbacks – he’d disappear for a day, and he’d just send me the text “spiraling” and I’d know what was happening and give him his space while he locked himself in his room. That would probably always happen, to some extent, and it was okay. He had issues just like I did. It was kind of a “who was crazier?” contest between us, to be honest, and that was fine.

  But one day he called me, totally nervous. He wanted to meet in front of the Bookworm, back where everything had started. I put on a hoodie from our new line of merch that read THE BKWRM in big black letters on the front, which I’d designed along with George. (Coffee mugs, Kindle covers, hats, laptop cases, and countless other items were in the production line, too, and the Bookworm was starting to look more and more like an actual career path for me. I was having more fun with the clothes than I would’ve ever guessed, and I was even thinking of taking a course in fashion design.)

  I got in my car and waited. My dad was on the porch with his boyfriend, Big Joe, going over final plans for the memorial for my mom in the courtyard, where he would be interring her ashes under an abstract statue of her. Against her wishes, we were transporting her ashes up to Jacksonville Beach – but I wasn’t going to let her run anymore. And I wasn’t going to hide from her, either. I wanted her close. I wanted her with me. She was here now. Might as well be here physically, too.

  By the way, Dooley had just decided she wanted to become a singer, and was going to provide the entertainment at the afterparty by doing some jazz standards in the courtyard. She performed a trial run for me, and hand to God, she was the worst singer I had ever heard in my life. Ever. She sounded like the slow death of an elderly housecat. But she was also the most enthusiastic and sincere, and I gave her a standing ovation and told her she’d be perfect for the event.

  On this day, George jogged over and slid into my passenger seat. He closed the door and just smiled at me, staring. He didn’t look scared, he didn’t look fidgety, he just looked like…George. A new George. And why did the world always seem to rejoice for us? The sun screamed into the car from the sunroof above, coronating us in gold. Dust swirled in the air around us, glinting in the light like confetti, throwing a personal party. Maybe we were destined for one another, the pre-written epilogues to each other’s stories. My favorite author had once described love as a hole you would never crawl out of. Right there in that car I fell into that hole a million times over, again and again, and suddenly I never wanted out of that hole. Love was home now.

  George rested a hand on my knee, and this time I didn’t flinch at all. Now I knew why. When I was young I let the world convince me of the lie that I was unlovable. But George made me the star of his show. He kissed me hard enough to make me believe I deserved it. He touched me softly enough to make me think I was worth the care. He loved me hard enough to make me realize I was just as valid a recipient of love as anyone else. I didn’t need to be rescued, and in the end, George didn’t “save” me, and I never needed a cheesy white horse. He just made me appreciate my given set of bones deeply eno
ugh to allow me to finally save myself.

  Speaking of that, I was forming a theory about love. Humans weren’t really built to love themselves. We were just animals, and what horse or monkey ever took an indulgent bath or went to a therapy session or patted themselves on the back after a job well done? The messy, unsaid truth about learning to love yourself was that sometimes it took the love of another person to nudge you in the right direction. After all, antiques sat in closets for decades until they were brought on Antiques Roadshow and appraised for small fortunes, after which point they were cleaned and prized and finally valued. Until you knew the worth of something, you did not treasure it. Finding love out there in the world was one thing, but looking inside yourself and finding something in there that was worth loving – that was true victory. And George was nudging me there. Sure, my mom had left me high and dry, and I was dealing with that – but that didn’t mean I had to live in fear that George would exit, too.

  George cleared his throat and told me he’d written me a letter.

  “Will you read it while I go shop?” he asked. “I would faint if you read it in front of me. You know how I am about that.”

  “I would love to.”

  He started to say something, then stopped. Silently he got out and went into the bookstore, leaving me alone. This reminded me that the new J.K. Rowling mystery was just in, but I shook the thought from my mind. Then I sort of gasped as I realized that this was the first time I’d ever willingly refrained from buying books. Finally, the bookworm had found something better.

  A violin played from my speakers, and it was so beautiful it broke my heart. George looked back at me through the window, and I took out my phone. The message came. He disappeared nervously into the store, and I smiled and opened it.

  The thing is, Teddy, I want to write you a big epic letter like they do in the books, a letter to tell you how I feel and express what you mean to me and all that jazz. But I am not a writer. Writers and writers. I’m just George, and words are Christmas lights I can’t string into anything beautiful. So here goes, a collection of thoughts, scattered but heartfelt all the same:

  I love you. I want your midnights but I want your Sundays, too. I want to be there even when you’re annoyed with me. I don’t just want the best parts of you, because you didn’t just look for the best of me. I want to be there for every page of your story. You saw the worst of me and you shrugged. And as we both deal with the things that bring us down, as we deal with real life together, I hope we continue to do so side-by-side.

  I don’t know what the last page of our particular story would say, because along with writing, soothsaying is not among my talents, either. But I’ll be there whether your road is bumpy or easy, whether your skies are blue or grey. Because I am a character in your narrative now. Whatever happens, I want my story to write itself right alongside yours, and when The End does come one day, I’d be honored to be anywhere near you.

  So pick up your pen, weirdo. Let’s get writing. Nobody would ever write some thrilling book about us, about two nerds in an everyday town who found love amid the bookshelves. But we can write it ourselves. Anything can happen now. Let’s go see how alive we can be.

  -George

  ~

  I finished his letter and just breathed for a moment.

  Everyone knew bookworms couldn’t find love. Everyone knew they’d been swindled by a lifetime of fantasies, tricked by evil authors into believing the world was full of six-foot-tall hotties who dressed like European fashion bloggers and kissed you like they meant it and took you to bed like prehistoric cavemen. Everyone knew that for bookworms who’d spent their lives believing these men existed, real life would probably always fall flat in comparison, and love would perhaps always prove disappointing. But George made me believe love could exist in real life – that it could be real and tangible and something that could actually happen outside of my bookshelf. He didn’t look like a Calvin Klein model or write me love notes all day or fly me to island beaches on his personal helicopter, but he was still better than the book boyfriends in his own remarkable, slightly broken way. He was better because he was real. He was real because he was stupid and strange and amazing enough to love me.

  Suddenly I saw myself in my head, but the Me of five years ago. Old Teddy, the one who would’ve never gotten a letter like this because he had closed himself off from the entire world. There he went, rushing off to school twenty minutes late, ignored and overlooked, hiding under sweaters and scowls and misery, keeping himself alone in a world that seemed to have it out for him. There I was two years ago, chasing people who weren’t interested and getting ditched and then finally trying to find the person in me my mother hadn’t been able to see, starting a long slow battle to love myself, standing up and telling the world I was worth the fight.

  And finally there I was, the morning I met George, brushing my teeth and looking in the mirror and trying and failing to appreciate what I saw. But I was still so proud of that kid, every iteration of him, every last version of him. Because he tried. He kept going. He was strong and stupid enough to risk it all, to throw himself out there and try again. Even when it hurt.

  I stared up at the Bookworm and thought of all the people I’d met, all the people I’d loved, all the people I thought I’d loved, all the people I would never see again. My father with his bad jokes and selfless hugs, Dooley with her sisterly teasing, the Bookworm customers with their heartbreaking stories told from over hot cups of coffee. And all the heartbreakers of my past – they’d given me things, too. I owed them all little bits of my broken heart. The first Charles – he’d taught me my worth by violating that worth, and taught me how to walk away when that worth wasn’t being honored. He also taught me that nobody could ever love you if they didn’t even love themselves first, and that love was never delivered in a harsh way, not at all. And my mother, my poor mother, who’d taught me that love was never something to refuse, a gift that came without strings, no matter the wrapping paper it came in. That messed-up woman had tried for me, she’d really tried, and she was so wonderful for trying. Her effort meant the world, it really did. Even if she’d kind of failed in the end.

  And now here was George, bright-eyed and broken-smiled. He’d found me at my most vulnerable and remade me. I’d found him when he was weak, too, but trying to be stronger. I’d wanted so badly for us to fix each other, to become absorbed into each other until we filled in all our own cracks, but now I knew we didn’t need to. We were both damaged, broken together, we’d both been burned and fucked over by this life, and we were better and fuller and wiser for it. What was wrong with a little regret, if it opened your eyes and made you more grateful?

  The sun’s evening death party was just blooming in the west, casting a golden glow on the palms as they swayed as if in sepia tone. I loved George, I loved with everyone I had ever been, and everyone I ever would be. But could I tell him that? Could I tell George what I had never told anyone else, not even my father? Could I utter those words the world had stolen from me? I was still so afraid of those eight letters, said out loud. Love had ruined me before, and I never wanted to go down that destructive road again. Once bitten, twice shy. And I was so shy.

  But here was a boy who was weird enough to love me. And in the end, the love he gave me wasn’t like the love in the books, the love I’d lusted after that first day in the café. This was beyond that. Beyond art. No one could have written the tenderness in his eyes when he wrapped me up and held me in that hospital, no author could’ve conjured the triumph in the air on that breezy night in Key West when he co-saved me. When the last page came, George Charles wasn’t like the boyfriends in my books. He wasn’t a book boyfriend. He was better. He set me free, made me wander, made me wonder. That handsome little nerd made me new again. I was so grateful.

  I got out of the car and felt my feet carrying me through the door, back to the beginning, back to the first page of chapter one. When I walked toward George, though, I knew I wasn’
t the only thing entering the room. I was honest about my monsters now. If you looked really close, all around me you could find the markings of my past – my abuser, my molester, my pain, my fear, my quirks, my baggage, all the people who had ever disappointed me and let me down, floating around me like little ghosts. I came with all that.

  But George had his bags, too – he had his sickness and his demons and everything else that kept him up at night and made him keep himself away from the world. But together we could join and merge and try to succeed not because of our baggage, but in spite of it. Two bookworms could walk into the future down a road paved with those bags, if we cast them aside correctly. And now I had all the faith I needed.

  “George?” I asked, suddenly aware of the thunderous beating of the muscled organ in my chest, keeping me miraculously alive. He turned around, hope and fear mixing like paint on his face.

  “Yeah?”

  I wanted to say it, that thing I felt in my heart, but I still couldn’t – not out loud, at least. I still wasn’t quite there yet, even though I hoped to be soon. So I took a pen from the counter and did something better. I’d put my love for him back where it all started: in our books.

  I grabbed the hardback from his hands.

  Took one thrilling breath.

  Wrote three little words on the inside cover.

  I

  love

  you

  “Take your broken heart. Make it into art.” – Carrie Fisher

  I wrote a book. It’s a romance about flawed, average, quirky men in an everyday town who happen to fall in love, but it’s also about a silent battle that America doesn’t really like talking about – mental health. As a child my Social Anxiety Disorder was so bad I remember standing outside classrooms, chest thumping, too afraid to walk inside. I remember hiding in the bathroom at football practice because I simply could not face other kids. I was far more comfortable with books than I was with people, so I disappeared into literature and became a bookworm. And I did not share these symptoms until I was much older, because America acts like illnesses have to be visible in order to be real. But the brain can be just as broken as a bone. The sheer panic I felt in crowded rooms, the horror that plunged into my chest at church every Sunday – those symptoms were very real. And that’s why I wrote a book about them. A problem that is not named cannot possibly be fixed. So here it is. My problem. In the form of a book. Hope you like it.