My fabrications seemed to be of a different fabric from the stuff of my life. When writing, I never limited myself to being me, to knowing the facts as I knew them. It’s not that I wrote fantasy—I didn’t think of it as fantasy. I thought of it as another person’s reality, another place’s reality, separate from my own. Fiction was what happened when I released words onto the keys, played unseeable movies in my head. It was not life. It was never meant to be life.
* * *
—
We didn’t sleep together until the fifth date.
It’s not that the eagerness eluded us. Even during the first date, there was a giddy physicality to our movements, that telegraphic dance of words and touches. But our calendars conspired against us—there was always something one of us needed to wake up early for, or a reason we needed to part at a certain hour. Normally, this would have built frustration within me, but with Callum, it felt like everything would happen in its own time. We knew we were attracted to each other, without having to say so. There was an energy in the air, and we knew we would harness it.
I always liked having guys come to my apartment—I liked sleeping in my own bed—but we ended up at Callum’s after that fifth date, because it was in a closer part of Brooklyn. I didn’t know what to expect. Some guys I dated had Star Wars sheets on their beds; others slept on futons salvaged from the street, or had apartments that were the epitome of Architectural Digestion. Callum was a graphic designer for a nonprofit and dressed like the rest of Brooklyn, so I wasn’t sure whether I was going to get Swedish progressive or hipster ironic. But ultimately, his apartment’s aesthetic was home. I can’t think of another word to describe it. It was lived-in without being messy, furniture chosen for comfort, not statement. On the refrigerator were drawings he and his brother had done when they were kids—“penguins taking over the world,” he explained.
We drank and we talked and then, word-drunk and wine-happy, we fell into kissing, fell into horizontality, fell into bed. It was comfortable there, too.
When we were done, when we were reduced to two deeply satisfied heartbeats, I leaned into him as he held on to me, the lightness of smiles in the air, in our words.
“Tell me a story,” he said.
“About what?” I asked.
“You’re the writer. You tell me.”
I shifted so I could see him, kiss him again.
“Writing stories and telling stories are two very different things,” I said. “Writing, for me, involves a copious amount of staring off into space. I’m awful at making things up on the spot.”
“C’mon,” he said, pulling the sheet up to our shoulders.
Even in the near dark, Callum’s eyes caught the light, glimmered in my direction. I felt such a wild rush of liking for him then—the rush that comes from finding someone good, someone worthy, someone wonderful.
“I need you to name the prince,” I found myself saying.
“The prince?”
“In this story. What’s his name?”
“Isadora.”
I smiled. “And what is the name of Prince Isadora’s kingdom?”
“Euphoria.”
I did not start with Once upon a time, although I might as well have. Because that’s what it felt like—starting off at once, upon a time.
* * *
—
I had no desire to move quickly into a relationship. But Callum wasn’t “a relationship.” He was Callum.
Our days redrew themselves to bring us closer to each other. I would wake at the same time he did, just to have that hour of snooze-alarm negotiation, stumbling for coffee, dreading and cheerleading at the start of the day. Then he would head to work and I would head to my laptop, plugging into whatever world I was bringing into shape. I ended up working better at his kitchen table than I did at any spot in my own apartment, or at any café. I would leave during the day, to get lunch, to do the laundry, to run whatever errand needed running. But when he came home, he’d find me at the table, typing away or staring into space. I’d often ask him for a page’s worth of time, to make a graceful exit from whatever scene I was in. Then I would shut the laptop and close that world for the night. We made dinner, and I heard about his day. Then we’d watch some television, or go see a movie. Then bedtime, which always ended with storytime. Even if we were exhausted, I would tell him something new about Prince Isadora and the land of Euphoria. Sometimes it was just a fact—“In Euphoria, the census is taken by centaurs”—and other times the story would continue. There were times he’d fall asleep as I was talking, and other times I’d fall asleep in between sentences. But most nights I got to the point when I’d say, “And the rest, we shall find out tomorrow.”
“Goodnight, Prince Isadora,” Callum would say.
And I’d reply, “Goodnight, Euphoria.”
* * *
—
For five months, we had this. For five months, it was easy. We might not have labeled it as easy, because there were still small struggles along the way. The worsening of his job. My inability to make my deadline, and the fact that I wouldn’t be paid until I hit it. The friend or two of his I didn’t like, and the friend or three of mine he couldn’t stand. The feeling that it was too soon to talk about moving in together, but also the ridiculousness of double rent when we spent every night together. There were bumps in the road, for sure. But there was no doubt as to the direction we were traveling.
Then, five months into it, things started to go wrong. Not for us, but for him.
It started with small things. He left his wallet at a restaurant, and when he got it back, his credit card and debit card were gone. His computer, without any warning, turned a sword to its own heart, taking all of his files with it. An expected tax refund morphed into an unexpected tax debt. Trying to hold open a subway door for an old lady, he jammed his finger so badly that it needed to be put in a splint, which made his work as a designer much harder. We tried to make light of it, and at night I had much worse misfortunes befall Prince Isadora—plagues of penguins that ate all the crops, an attack from a horde of bears that pummeled their prey with bad stand-up comedy, a princess in a tower who Prince Isadora thought loved him, only to find that she was auditioning for reality TV.
“Poor Prince Isadora,” Callum would say.
And I’d say, “Oh, but it could be worse.”
Without ever saying it, we both believed that our luck rode a sine wave, that the ups would follow the downs in time, that life could somehow recognize when it had thrown too many troughs, and adjust accordingly.
Like fools, we believed in fairness.
* * *
—
The phone call did not come at three in the morning. It came at three in the afternoon, and there was no way for Callum to know it was a bad phone call until he picked up. I was not there. He was at work, and I was at home in the world of my words. He thought his mother was calling to say hello. But when he picked up, she couldn’t choke out any words on the other end. She had to pass the phone to her sister, Callum’s aunt, who said his brother had been in an accident, and hadn’t made it through.
If I’d been a different kind of writer—if I’d been the kind who checks the internet every five minutes—I might have seen it on the news. Just one line on the Yahoo home page: Fifteen-car pile-up on icy Massachusetts highway; five dead. Had I seen it, I might have thought briefly of Callum’s family up there. But I didn’t see it, so when Callum called me, I was expecting a question about dinner.
Within minutes of hanging up, I had arranged for a rent-a-car and packed our bags. Rinna walked Callum home, left him in my care. His suit was in my hand as they walked in the door, and when he saw it, he burst into a new round of tears. I went over to comfort him, but what comfort could I really offer? I felt so deeply inadequate, and so incredibly mad at the universe.
On the driv
e up to Boston, we listened to wordless music; Callum wasn’t ready yet to hear what the singers had to offer. When he spoke, it was of concern for his parents, concern for his brother’s girlfriend. I didn’t force my own concern on him. The conversation was his to control.
That night, sharing his childhood bedroom, was when we moved in with each other. It didn’t need to be discussed, or even openly acknowledged. We had become inseparable, and now we knew it.
As we turned off the lights on a long, awful day, I was expecting Callum to want to be alone with his thoughts, in his own space. But instead he drew close to me, and as he had on the far easier, much less broken night before, he asked me to tell him a story.
I could not bring myself to put Prince Isadora through anything else. I couldn’t bear the thought of any more hardship. Yes, I realized, imagination can always show us how much worse it can be. But now I needed imagination to give me something better.
So that night, Prince Isadora went bowling for the first time, and very quickly fell in love.
* * *
—
Three weeks later—three weeks—Callum lost his job.
His boss felt awful about it. Genuinely awful. But the fiscal year was ending that week, and it needed to be done before then. Callum wasn’t the only one cut—the nonprofit had to shed a dozen employees, because the donations had stopped coming in. They were sure Callum could continue doing some freelance design work. Numb, he thanked his boss for that.
This time he didn’t call me. When he came home, he found me unpacking some of my books onto his shelves. I had given up my place two days before.
“Oh dear,” he said. “I seem to have lost my job.”
“Goodness, that’s a rather big thing to lose,” I said. “Do you remember where you last put it?”
He smiled. Put down his bag.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too,” I told him.
“This is bad. Really bad.”
“Let’s not focus on the lost,” I told him. “Let’s focus on the found.”
I knew he was devastated. It was so clear. But I also knew he didn’t want to see the devastation reflected in my face, my posture.
He hadn’t taken off his coat, so I grabbed mine, and we went to our favorite bar. Over strong martinis, he told me what had happened.
“Their timing is really impressive,” I observed.
“I know,” Callum said, clinking my glass.
“We’ll figure something out,” I said, making sure he heard the we.
“We will,” he replied. “And in the meantime, we’re not telling my parents.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Callum looked at me softly then, tenderly.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?” I asked.
And he replied, “For enduring everything I’m about to put you through.”
* * *
—
We spent money we didn’t really have, the money we were hypothetically saving by living together, by not drinking every night, by never smoking. I bought him a new computer and a new suit for interviews.
At first, with the two of us home during the day, it felt like an extended weekend. But then it started to feel like a weekend that had outlasted its stay. He volunteered to go elsewhere, to kill time in museums and movies. But I had no desire to exile him from his own apartment, even if it was now technically both of ours. So I took my laptop and set up shop in libraries, in cafés, and even in the apartment of a friend who needed a house sitter for a month.
Because Callum’s days were now longer, mine felt longer, too, as if I could feel his restlessness, his helplessness, wherever I was. I found that his truth started to permeate my fiction. Out of love, out of concern, out of frustration, his was the story I couldn’t stop telling. I wanted to wrestle control from whoever was writing his script, and take it on myself. I wanted to force the happy ending. And since I couldn’t do that, I gave it to my characters instead.
The one place reality didn’t interfere was in bed at night, where I’d unspool the trials and triumphs of Prince Isadora. Mountains bent to his will. Dragons scattered from his path. Bureaucrats dropped their pencils and monkeys gathered them to make yellow tree houses in his honor.
I knew Callum was unhappy, and I also knew that I was not the cause of the unhappiness. So I did the best that I could. I found the life raft and inflated it with words. Some were the usual consolations: It will get better. Work will come. This will end. He wouldn’t want you to be paralyzed with sadness. He’d want you to go on. And others were fantastical fictions drawn in the middle of the night, the refuge of a wandering mind, infused by the collateral joy that comes from making something out of nothing. Words were my tools of creation. And love, I learned, is a constant act of creation, just as creation is almost always an act of love.
* * *
—
There was constant guilt. He was a much better person than I was, so I felt that he should be treated better by life. I’d love to say it was harder to go through secondhand, that witnessing misery is harder than experiencing it. But that’s not true. There’s pain in both, but more pain in the latter.
A bad patch, people would tell us. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
But no. What doesn’t kill you can leave you weak, vulnerable, sad. There is strength in survival, yes. Profound strength. But that does not negate despair.
Callum started to talk about leaving the city, because the city was so easy to blame. He mentioned this as an escape we could both make. But my life was here. And even though I loved him, I didn’t know if I loved him more than the rest of my life.
The tension built, and since neither of us could really handle tension, the argument broke out pretty quickly. Over dinner, our futures locked horns. I told him that he didn’t want to leave the city, that he was just giving up. He told me I had no idea what he was going through, or how haunted he was by the way things could go so wrong.
“You didn’t do anything to deserve this,” I told him.
“If I stay here, I’ll just keep slipping into the same hole,” he said. “This is the abyss. I truly feel like it’s the abyss.”
What had once been a bright spark in him was now turning into a different conflagration. It wasn’t that his spirit was being snuffed out. It still burned, but now it burned harmfully.
“We can figure something out,” I said. “You’re not as deep in the abyss as you think you are.”
“I don’t want to think it gets any worse than this,” he said. “This whole year is a disaster.” He stopped, heard what he’d said. “Except for the part where I met you.”
“Yes,” I couldn’t help but say. “Except that minor detail.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
I did know. I told him I knew. But still it hovered there.
After dinner was over, he went into the bedroom to work on his website, while I stayed at the kitchen table, ostensibly to get some writing done. But there was nothing there for me to write. The words in my head didn’t correspond in any way to the words that needed to be on the screen.
What do I want to say? my character kept asking himself.
But I was the only one who could give him the answer, and I was blank.
* * *
—
I scattered my attention to various websites, all as a way of avoiding the next step of my conversation with Callum. Finally, after about an hour, I headed into the bedroom. He didn’t turn as I came in, focusing on the windows on his screen. I didn’t want to wander back out, but I didn’t want to skulk, either. So I just lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. The sound of his typing continued, then stopped. I heard him stand up from his chair, then felt the dip in the bed as he joined me there.
“Callum—” I started. I was about to apologize. For what, I wasn’t sure. I just felt the need to apologize.
“Shh,” he told me. “I only want a story.”
This is why we love stories, and love them from an early age: Nothing bad ever lasts in stories. And this is ultimately why we love life, too—because nothing bad ever lasts in life, not with the same intensity with which it initially appears. If we pay attention, stories can teach us that.
I didn’t tell Callum this. Not outright. Instead Prince Isadora traveled through twelve different kingdoms that night. Time and again, it looked like he wouldn’t make it home to Euphoria. Storms raged. Sirens called. Monsters attacked. Doubt and grief dug in. But time and again, Prince Isadora made it back.
There are times when you need discussion, when you need conversation, when things need to be worked out by letting words work them out. But other times, you can stand on the bedrock, the essential nature of who you both are, and watch the words fly above you, dazzling the eye, impermanent and beautiful in the things they can conjure.
By three in the morning, we are a story in ourselves: two grown men still in our clothes, huddled comfortably in our life raft, traveling forward, forward, toward the welcoming shore.
TRACK EIGHT
A Better Writer
There’s no real story here—but isn’t that true for most crushes? Or maybe there is a story, but it’s just not the one I thought I was living at the time. That’s true for most crushes, too.
I was a freshman in college, and I got into a creative writing class. It would end up being the only creative writing class I ever took, but that’s immaterial. It was my second semester, and I was proud I’d made the cut. Almost everyone else in the class was older than me. Including Jamie Walker.
Jamie Walker was from the town I lived in the first year of my life, only two towns over from the town I lived in for the rest of my life (up until college). He had dark curly hair, was about my height. I can’t remember the color of his eyes, but I do remember they had a glimmer to them, the glimmer that people who are engaged by life tend to have. I am much more of a sucker for cute than hot, and he was definitely cute. Or at least in my memory he is. I could easily take my facebook down from my bookshelf (that’s small-f facebook—it’s a real book) and check. But I’m so much older than him now, and that two-year difference made him so much older than me then. I don’t want to alter that imbalance. I want to remember him as he was, even if that memory’s vague, and perhaps even wrong. Who he was to me matters so much more than who he actually was.
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