Please get me home, though I don’t know where it is

Transcribed from a journal entry dated 07/11/2017.

Lately I’ve been crying for no reason. It’s fine.

It usually happens when I listen to Johnny Gallagher’s music—not from his album, but from the bootlegs people have been posting to Mediafire as though they were full-length live albums. I downloaded them all in one go one night and listened to them as I fell asleep. They faded into one another, and into my subconscious. It was like that night years and years ago when I became a goner for the Strokes and—I remember this so vividly—drifted in and out of consciousness with Julian Casablancas insisting, “You’re no fun, you’re no fun, you’re no fun, you’re no fun,” in my ears.

The recordings came complete with the little spiels Johnny would give between songs, so it felt to me like I was listening to him do stand-up, too. He can be pretty funny, and it could be comforting, too, to listen to him just talking.

But the songs themselves, they take me someplace else. Not just because they’re live and raw so you feel like you’re in the room with that crowd. They’re just so heartfelt, and unfiltered, and real. I hadn’t really been listening to bootlegs for a long time, not since I was 12 and I had no other way to hear the Jonas Brothers’ yet-unreleased songs, particularly their cover of “Take On Me.” (I’m still waiting on a studio version.)

The Johnny recordings brought me back to that time of pure adoration and compromise: I would listen to imperfect, low-quality audio for you, because I love your music that much.

It’s interesting to me, getting to hear several different versions of certain songs at a time. I like being able to point out lyric changes, or shifts and hitches in his voice, or faster and slower takes. I especially like it when he makes a mistake and soldiers on, or when he has to start over. I’ve come to know the individual versions so well that I can pick out favorites—but parts of each of them are so endearing that I keep listening to them all anyway.

In his songs, Johnny’s a mess. He’s fucked up, and lost, vulnerable, self-deprecating. Lonely, heartbroken, and in love. He’s hard on himself. He’s defined by his mistakes. He’s in awe of the world around him. He’s sad and he’s going through something; he’s having the time of his life. He wants to be, he used to be, he is.

It’s the kind of confessional, open introspection that I’m always striving for in my own writing. Johnny has no problem admitting that he’s not always happy or that he has trouble holding his liquor most nights. And his melodies are deceptively simple, but emotionally complex and so beautiful. He’s mentioned that music is an extension of his identity, that he’d lose his head without it—and you can hear that feeling in him, even if it’s just him onstage with the guitar he’s had forever with the faded lightning bolt on the strap. He just has this way of putting words and lines together; you feel like you’re reading his journal and the writing is bleeding through the pages.

And obviously, I identify a lot with what he’s singing about, and it’s been helping me process some feelings and insecurities I can’t name. When I was first listening to Six Day Hurricane, I read some interviews where he talked about “Sarasota Someone”—how he’d written it during a time of inner turmoil and it became this escapist anthem disguised as a sunny pop song. “The irony [was],” he’d said, during one of his in-between talks, “I wrote this song in the summer, but it was winter, um, inside. So I was longing for a warmer place in my soul.”

I loved that. It was reassuring, the idea that he too has had that feeling of nobody loving him or caring about him, at least it seemed like. “No, don’t tell me who does,” he sings on “Why Oh Why Am I This Way?” which he’d written based off a note a friend had left in his apartment after staying overnight that simply said: Why, oh why, am I this way, why? It’s a song, he explained, about talking to himself in the mirror and questioning everything he does wrong—which can feel like all of them some days. And I think it’s the perfect companion song to “Imagine If,” where he’s tracking how much he’s changed, not knowing exactly when he did, and how much can still happen. That kind of ability to look inside yourself and be so honest about it is just something I can’t quite wrap my head around.

My favorite kind of writing makes use of concrete, ordinary details. The sublime, I learned in critical theory class, but it’s been so long and I’m probably bastardizing Longinus’ ideas. Point is, Johnny can deliver a one-sentence summary regarding certain moments in his life that led to his songs, and you can map them out and feel them unfurl in the music, and especially the lyrics.

“Those Wild Woods,” for example, takes memories from when he went with his family to Wildwood, New Jersey when he was 13 and lost his teddy bear Arthur, and combines them with reflections on a trip he made there himself when he got older. Cue vivid imagery of boardwalks, saltwater, and things burning down.

I don’t know. I guess I’m just so used to songs being esoteric, months spent stylistically analyzing Julian Casablancas’ lyrics for my (doomed) thesis, and all. Which must be why Johnny’s are so refreshing to me. I like knowing that “So Many Things,” which reminded me early on of The Academy Is...’ “After the Last Midtown Show,” is about unrequited love at a punk rock concert held inside a Unitarian church in 2002. Or that “Red Hook Romeo,” a.k.a. “Blood Orange Red Hook Baby,” is about a NyQuil-induced fever dream he’d had when he was down with a cold that wouldn’t go away. That “Came and Went” deals with being in your late 20s and not knowing what the hell is going on, or that “Jane’s House” is a love letter to an apartment he was moving out of and leaving behind. (“I’m a sentimental person.”) That “Constance” is a song he calls his most confessional, full of longing pretending to be contempt, about a time during which he made “no earthly sense.” That “Suburban Girl” came to fruition because he’d had a rough night he was wishing he could take back when he chanced upon the Facebook status of a family friend—a teenaged girl who was lying on the floor, playing with her cat—and, oh, how he wished things were still that simple.

I could go on forever, and, god, I probably have. My point (I can almost swear I have one, besides what has become an embarrassing show of devotion for one John Gallagher, Jr.) is: These songs have been moving me to tears when I pause and really listen to them, because, well, the obvious answer is I’ve been empty and lonely and sad and in need of an outlet, and I can’t write since everything feels pointless, so I’ve been letting what I feel (and can’t feel) out through them. Does that even mean anything? It’s like I’m living through John, who was able to process his hang-ups, and even though I’m consuming rather than creating, I’m able to understand myself a little and turn all this negative energy into something that feels like...something.

But I also cry because of secondhand sentiments of finality, aching, wistfulness, self-loathing. (Firsthand, too.) I cry because of his wisdom and because it amazes me how he can write so well. (I WILL NEVER BE OVER THIS.) I cry because these songs may be a little old, but they’re new to me—they’re so new. I cry because I want to express myself like that, I do, but I don’t quite remember how.

I cry because the songs make me believe in romance when I’ve lost faith in so much else. I cry because we seem to be equally lonely, but a little less so precisely because of the music.

I cry because he gets it, and I get him.

Seen it all but I’ve seen nothing yet

The gate was open.

That was the first thing I noticed when we got to the campsite. The gate was unlocked, and beyond it the waters were relatively calm, rolling onto shore in quiet bursts of bubbles and spray. I felt a familiar twitch in my fingers—it was instinct. Want. I wanted to get out there.

A few weeks ago, I never would have guessed that I would find myself on the coast of Batangas, gone camping for a PE class. I never would have guessed that I would find myself anywhere.

I hadn’t been to the beach in thirteen years.

The sun beat down on my back, filtering through the palm trees, as I shook off the twitch and snapped back to attention. I had waited approximately 117,000 hours for a chance to be near the beach again. A few more wouldn’t hurt.

I had a mountain to climb. Quite literally, in fact.

It was my first attempt at such an activity, and who am I kidding? Very likely my last. I spent the entirety of it clinging onto the rocks for dear life and unleashing an entire arsenal of creative, completely unwholesome expletives I didn’t even know I’d been storing in the back of my mind.

On the way up, a boy from my group took it upon himself to help me find my footing. I’d never spoken to him before, never even met him. (We kept missing each other in class.) I didn’t see his face the whole time, just reached for his hand—which he kept holding out to me despite rule number one, Save yourself first—and listened as he told me, “You can do it!” over and over.

I didn’t find out until much later that he was very, very cute. And I was absolutely mortified, for obvious reasons.

I took a shower as soon as we made the (even more life-threatening) descent and got back to the campsite, ditching my muddied running shoes for flip-flops. Everyone had plunked themselves down on the grass, downing their water bottles and taking deep breaths. Did that just really happen? It wasn’t even sundown.

But my mind was already elsewhere. I dusted myself off, and despite my pained limbs and distorted sense of self, I stepped around the backpacks and sleeping bags and made my way over to the gate.

I stepped out, already feeling lighter at the thought of being able to steal some alone time, slow and careful as though any sudden movements might make the beach disappear. But it stayed right where it was, where it’s always been and will be for all time, even when I took a bigger step and felt the lightness become a rapid giddiness.

The pier stretched before me, at its end an open structure with a straw roof and some beach chairs. And beyond, only the sea and the clouds. God, I’d forgotten that, too, the vastness of it. How it feels like it just goes on forever, and how blue it is, and how clear. I looked down and saw a school of fish, gathered together in a small patch of the endlessness.

I took it all in: the lush mountains, the boats painted in outrageous colors that reminded me of classic sorbetes carts, the flags, the shacks, the houses. The specks of people dotting the surface of the water, bobbing along, the sun glinting off their skin.

My body ached. The sound of the waves felt like the constant pulsing in my ears multiplied by a thousand. I had just survived reaching unfathomable heights, pulling myself up using my own two hands. (And, okay, clutching a reasonably attractive someone else’s for support.) I felt monumental and overwhelmed, and therefore alive.

I sat on a beach chair and caught my breath. It had been so long and I had been so young the last time that it felt like a first, somehow. My body no longer knew what saltwater felt like, or real waves, unpredictable, ones that weren’t fabricated in a giant pool.

The cell signal was strongest out there, which was funny to me. I sent a quick text to my parents to let them know I was okay. Then I made a Spotify playlist with every “sea” song off the top of my head: “Plastic Sea” by Minks, “The Sea” by Swim Deep, “Sea of Love” as covered by Cat Power, and a curveball, “Those Wild Woods” by Johnny Gallagher, because of a chorus that goes:

My feet in the sand 
Locked up by the land 
Believe I just might leave 
If I could

And to start it off, “A Beautiful Sea” from the Sing Street soundtrack.

It left me reeling, that happy-sad song whirling in my ears, the sight of an actual beautiful sea before me, with no one else around. It was cold and it smelled like the ocean.

I went down to the beach, took off my flip-flops, rolled up my leggings, and walked out to the surf. I sank my toes into the sand, felt it shift beneath me to support my weight. It was rocky and it hurt a little, but I didn’t care. I was waiting for the spray to hit. And it did, the waves came crashing, washing over my feet.

It reminds me now of Lovely, Dark and Deep by Amy McNamara, how it said the waves always seem to sound like they’re reciting Begin afresh, afresh, afresh from the Philip Larkin poem “The Trees.”

But right then my only thought was: I want the sea to swallow me whole.

That night it rained, sudden and unrelenting. It was a storm, really. The safest place for us to stay was the shack that held the showers, so we found ourselves huddled on the slightly flooded tiles, telling stories and singing silly songs. Immediately it was clear that our tents would not be habitable—luckily I had thought to chuck my stuff into the giant plastic bags I’d brought for the exact purpose of protecting them from rain—and soon our professors were ushering us into the large, fancy rest house they were staying in. When I think about it now, it makes me feel warm: dozens of students, piled on top of each other on every available surface in a way that was more cozy than claustrophobic, finally sheltered and dry. Someone brought out a guitar and started another singalong, others were playing card games and maybe truth or dare. 

I was on the floor next to Andrea. She had noticed my wrists at dinner, and I had gone still. We’d met a couple of years before taking an Art Studies class and had even gone to a spoken word show together for a group project, and by a stroke of fate we were groupmates again for this class. But still—we barely knew each other, and I didn’t know how to respond to having her know me like this. Vulnerable, raw. 

But then she said, “It’s okay. Me, too.”

And that was a lot. It was so important to be seen and understood like that, when I didn’t even have a diagnosis and when it felt like I was being gaslit into thinking I was just making everything up, that there was nothing wrong with me. 

We talked the whole night. 

I don’t think Andrea and I have spoken since the class ended, which is a shame. But I’ll always be grateful to her for sharing her own stories with me and for helping me make sense of myself when nothing else ever did. 

The next day the skies were clear and pristine, like the night before hadn’t even happened. I was glad, because the water activities were the last thing on our schedule before we had to go home to the city.

It was surprisingly easy for me to fall back into old habits, like collecting shells and sitting at the very edge of the shore, crushing sand with my fists and letting the waves wash over my legs.

I had been planning to do my own thing, but my camping buddies convinced me to go on a banana boat ride with them. That thing was surprisingly fast—just enough to be a rush, thrilling, so you’d be on the edge of fearing for your life. The wind was in my face. I’d never been that far out in the water before.

We decided we wanted to flip the boat over at the end. The driver made the turn and gave us the signal. I let go at the very last second, before everything went upside-down.

We all went underwater. In those few seconds of complete suspension before my life vest propelled me back to the surface, I thought about Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho, that last line about how jumping into the ocean hurt, but also felt good.

Soon enough we were saying goodbye—some of us for good. I pretended I wasn’t standing around waiting to talk to the boy who had helped me, but in the back of my mind, I knew. I mean, if he was always going out of his way to say hello and check up on me, even at the gas station on the drive back, or on the banana boat where he sat in front of me and we made nice perfectly pleasant small talk, the least I could do was say goodbye.

I can see it on a dumb souvenir shirt: I climbed a mountain and all I got was this lousy schoolgirl crush. 

We fist-bumped. I said it was nice to meet him, because I wanted to be as obvious as humanly possible. He said my name. He’s always saying my name. I don’t know how he knows my name, I never told him. And just like that, we’d all gone our separate ways.

Years from now I’ll say we shared a life-or-death experience, and then we never saw each other again. But at the time I hoped I was wrong about the second part.

Looking back it feels surreal. I was miles from home with only near-strangers for company, and I had to pretend I wasn’t in the middle of my worst depressive period yet. The physical and social exertion was draining.

But I learned so much, about mountains, about the ocean, and about myself. I learned that human beings can be nice, more decent than I give them credit for most days. And if people I just met can show me kindness, then maybe I can afford to be a little kinder to myself as well.

On the beach I walked out, all the way into the water, and didn’t stop until it reached up to my chin. I looked ahead at the horizon, tried to make out anything, the farthest my eyes could see. It was all sky, and water, and light. I floated on my back, closed my eyes, the glare of the sun dazzling even through my eyelids. I tasted the salt and kept my palms up.

The waves came. They carried me, threatened to pull me under and anchored me at the same time. I was lighter than air.

The sea was finally swallowing me whole.

Let's try this again

Two months ago I was at an archaeological exhibit in school and I started crying. 

I was alone, surrounded by artifacts that have been around for centuries and millennia: earthenware, ceramics, and rocks thought to be extraterrestrial materials, uncovered ninety years ago. I remember how they were illuminated by fluorescent lights, glowing as though they really were otherworldly and magical. I remember the way they blurred together when the tears came, desperate and feverish. 

All of them, I thought, matter more than I can ever hope to. All of them will outlast me. 

It was a nice reminder of my insignificance in the larger scope of things, and even on the ground I walk. I felt more impermanent, more temporary, than ever. 

The seven months that have passed since I last wrote on here have been tough. Let's just say I really thought I wouldn't make it this time. 

But by some cosmic force, I held on. There were journal entries, the beach, sad songs, sad songs that sound like '90s discotheques, and something a total stranger said on the internet: Hopefully, over time, you can learn how to care for yourself in safer, more loving ways.

And friends, and family, and realizing that saying it out loud, physically, person to person, made a difference. 

I'm writing a lot and I'm experiencing things I wanted so badly to live for. I'm not actively destroying my own body, and the parts of it I thought I'd destroyed are healing. I want to get better. I'm getting better. 

I'm still here, somehow. 

nobody really says “rewind” anymore

I pull him along and refuse to dwell on the feel of his hand back in mine. He follows, lets me lead him across hallways and up and down staircases. He isn’t pulling away.

We’re looking for someplace private because there are matters we need to discuss—at least, that’s what I’ve told him. In a small-town school where everybody knows who you are and what your deal is, this kind of solace and discretion is difficult to come by. The hour we have free for our lunch break is going and going, but I keep walking, intent on getting something done before it’s gone.

We stop in front of a door. It leads to the janitor’s closet.

Reed shrugs, brows furrowed, a question. I shrug back. He takes the lead, pulls me into the cramped space. The door thuds and clicks behind us as it closes, and it feels like a finality.

We pause in the darkness for a few moments before it occurs to either of us to look for the light switch.

“Better,” he declares, when he finds it and we can see each other again in the flickering glare.

“Yeah,” I say. I watch him watch me, his expression curious and expectant, and my first instinct is to turn the lights back out. I feel transparent, inside out, the mess and the complexities of my inner workings very suddenly exposed. And yet, the strangest of things, I don’t feel like abandoning what I’ve set out to do.

This morning I woke up and I was seventeen again. As in: The last six years never happened. As in: I was back in high school, and I was somebody completely different. As in: The plot of that TV show Hindsight. As in: When I got to school, disoriented and begrudging, there he was, right where I’d left him, exactly as I knew him. Reed Arias.

He had no idea.

It was jarring, finding Reed at my locker, talking too fast about some mundanity or other that I hadn’t thought about in who knows how long. The English assignment on Animal Farm. Quadratic functions. How much sleep he lost over an art project. “I’ve missed you,” I wanted to say, although I hadn’t even admitted it to myself, but then he was already going on about some IMs we apparently exchanged last night, and why had I disappeared on him?

I didn’t need reminding, but here it was anyway, concrete proof of something that had begun to seem like it had never taken place at all. A lost-and-found sense of normal, and anything but.

My world had been full of him at this age. Reed would never get it, could never fathom that by our early twenties we would each be pretending the other didn’t exist. And that it was just this thing that happened, like the pages of your favorite books yellowing or milk going bad. The kind of thing you didn’t notice until it was too late.

We had science lab first period. He made attempts to distract me from five tables away instead of helping his partner with the water cycle experiment we were supposed to be doing. Whenever I’d look over, he’d already be looking back, his features both soft and certain. His fingers brushed my elbow lightly when he passed me on his way to rinse a graduated cylinder. Soon I will simply evaporate, he sang at one point, my favorite line from a song we both loved, and I knew it was only for me.

In English class he passed me a note. (Impressive, considering he sat on the last row and I sat on the second.) On it he’d written only three words, with no regard for capitalization or punctuation.

boxer deserved better

I flinched as soon as I unfolded it, staring down at a piece of paper I hadn’t looked at in years, lost to one of the overstuffed journals of my youth. I had cut it up and painted over it with watercolor, and here it was again, pure white and whole.

I read it over and over for a long time. Eventually it hit me: I knew what this day was and what it meant for him and me.

At the end of the day Reed would sit with me at the front steps and tell me he’d be going away for the summer, to stay with his grandparents in Portland. He would start to speak again, but my ride home would arrive and I’d be in a hurry, cutting him off with an apology thrown over my shoulder before he could get the words out. “Tell me later!” I would yell from the car window. He would never try again.

This summer he wouldn’t write or reply to my messages. When he came back nothing would be the same. In a few years he would corner me at a party and confess, drunkenly, that he had been about to say how he really felt about me. He would proceed to pass out against the bathroom tile, his spiel lost to his alcohol-induced stupor. I would never hear the rest.

I wouldn’t have seen him since, and I’d be left wondering how it could have gone differently for the rest of my life.

By the end of third period I’d decided it was time for me to find out.

Few things made sense about my situation, and I still didn’t know how I got myself stuck in the past, but I was starting to think that perhaps this wasn’t some random, if slightly unreal, occurrence. Maybe there was some sort of purpose to it.

When the bell rang I booked it out of my seat and accosted Reed by the doorway of his art class. I’d spent the entirety of history class obsessing over the note and what I should do. I’d been through all this—I was done with the mind games and the second-guessing. I was done fucking around.

“We need to talk,” I said. There was a slight panic in my voice that I swallowed down. “I need to tell you something,” I added, more steadily and evenly.

If he thought I was being weird, he didn’t let on. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Which brings us full circle to where we left off: Us, hiding in a dimly-lit closet, surrounded by drying mops and industrial bottles of citrus-scented disinfectant.

Reed takes a packet of cherry-flavored Airheads out of his pocket and starts chewing. “Grace?” he prods.

I busy myself by fiddling with the hem of my skirt. It would be best, I know, to just rip the band-aid off, to come right out and say it. Thing is, I’ve changed a lot in the six years that came and went and disappeared, but I’m still not as put-together and sure of myself as I’d like to be.

I have to be careful, and I have to do this right. I need more time.

I start by telling (some of) the truth. “I didn’t really have anything urgent to say.” I force it out before I raise my eyes to meet his.

Reed’s expression goes slack. “You must have brought us here for a reason,” he says.

He’s trying to understand—he wants to understand—so I try my best to give him a coherent explanation. “I think I just wanted a real conversation,” I say. “It seems to me like it’s been so long since we’ve been able to just sit down and talk.”

“What are you talking about? We talk every day.”

“This is different. Out there,” I say, motioning to the juvenile madness that’s without a doubt happening around us, “it’s too much. We’re always swamped. I feel like I have no idea what’s really been going on with you lately.”

I’m talking from memory. He was on the swim team and he volunteered at the library. I was associate editor of the school paper, and had Literary Society meetings on Thursdays. Between all of that and our classes, we barely had a moment to ourselves. It’s cathartic, getting it all out in the open. I thought I was improvising, but I realize that I’m not pulling it out of nowhere—I carried it around with me all those years ago. I just never got around to saying it out loud.

I was afraid my feelings were unfounded, that I was being irrational.

“Bear with me,” I plead. “I don’t know how to make you understand this, because I don’t even think I understand it fully myself.”

Reed doesn’t say anything, just listens.

“We always talk about all these things—books and movies—and I love that we agree on them for the most part.” At this he smiles slightly, tentatively, and somehow I can tell he remembers that argument we had once over Perfect Blue. “But I guess it bothers me that I can’t see them from your point of view, and that you can’t see them from mine. Not really.”

“I want to talk about the future,” I go on, and for a second I’ve forgotten that I’ve already lived it. I almost laugh out loud at the thought. “Not ours, although there’s that too, but what you imagine it’ll be like. I want to talk about the last thing that scared you and the last thing that made you feel alive. I want to know if there’s an overlap between these things. I want to hear the things you won’t tell just anybody.”

I move back against the door to create more space between us. It’s futile, of course; there’s hardly any more room in the closet. In a quieter voice, I say, “I wanted to get you alone.”

He studies me for a minute. The longer this goes on, the more certain I become that I’ve blown it.

Maybe I’ve read it wrong all this time. Reed was never in love with me all along. None of what I just said is making sense to him. And I don’t blame him for not getting it, but I wish he’d take a hint.

Then again, I am the one who’s doing the verbal equivalent of walking in circles.

When Reed finally speaks, his voice is even and measured. “Funny you should talk about an overlap,” he says. “Because the last thing that scared me and the last thing that made me feel alive are basically the same thing.”

I ask him what he means.

“It was two things, actually.” He ticks them off with his fingers. “The fervency in your voice when you said you had something important to tell me, and your grip on my arm as we ran across the corridors looking for this place.”

“That scared you?”

“I thought you might have had bad news,” he explains. “But I also had this feeling that it was another thing entirely.” His eyes move over my own quickly, then he looks away. “I mean, I hoped.”

“And was it?”

“Was it what?”

I hesitate. Then, “Did it go the way you hoped?”

Instead of answering the question, Reed says, “For the record, Grace, I’d like to know these kinds of things about you, too.”

I let it sit. I say nothing and suck in a breath when he wordlessly strips off his navy sweater and rummages in his backpack. Shoulders, arms, chest, stomach, back, and all. It’s a sudden, casual show of skin that shouldn’t be new to us, but is now making my insides feel like they’re slowly, slowly igniting all over.

I draw my breath back out when he’s finished changing into one of his swim team shirts. “Practice later,” he says, by way of explanation.

Go, Tridents.

Later I nudge Reed’s knee with my shoe. “Tell me something else.”

“About myself?”

“About anything at all.”

“Okay,” he says, and he has to think for a second. “Ernest Hemingway had four wives in his lifetime. Did you know that?” I shake my head. I didn’t. He continues, “The first was Elizabeth Hadley Richardson—she was called Hadley.

“He wrote that he knew he was going to marry her when they met. They lived in Paris. They traveled the world, but their best days were their simplest. Hemingway would write during the day and come home to her and their little boy at night. They were young and in love, and for a while, it was enough.”

He tells me how she learned to become more strong-willed and welcoming of chance. How she lost a suitcase filled with her husband’s manuscripts, and how he was utterly heartbroken. How she never quite fit in with his more glamorous friends from the legendary group of writers known as the Lost Generation. How she read The Sun Also Rises as it was being written and became upset when she didn’t see a shred of herself in it, as though her existence in Hemingway’s life had stopped mattering.

And it’s in this moment, as I listen to him ramble on, that I feel an intense rush of affection for him. There’s something else; I’ve never felt anything like it, and I never will again, I’m sure, but a certain resolve just explodes in my chest. It evolves into a fearlessness, and then into an overwhelming want. It builds and it builds.

It has been building for as long as I’ve ever known.

“Hemingway married three more times,” he’s saying, “but it was never quite the way it had been with Hadley. Later in his life, his memories of her would be poignant, wistful.”

The loss of him plays out in my mind, scenes from another life blurring together like a fever dream. I see us at that party. We had locked ourselves in the bathroom upstairs and despite myself I had suppressed a smile when Reed nearly fell into the tub. He had said, I was going to tell you.

“He wished he could have died,” he tells me now, “before he could love anyone else.”

I cross the minuscule line of demarcation between us and kiss him.

Reed freezes, but he doesn’t break the kiss. And then, gently, he pulls me by the collar so that I’m straddling him.

His hands stray. They move down my skirt, tracing the shape of my thighs, but just when I’m about to ask him what he’s doing, I realize he’s fixing it to give me my modesty. (Even though modesty is kind of the last thing I want, right now, with him.) When he’s done he places his palms flat on the ground, on either side of him. With one hand, I grab at his sleeve to steady myself.

He kisses differently than he moves. I think of him underwater, slick with concentration, bullet-fast, graceful and precise. Or when he’s shelving at the library, serious and methodical, his arms straining with the weight of the thick volumes. Or the way he drives, no-fuss and no-nonsense, his grip tight on the wheel and his gaze straight ahead even as he warns me not to spill my soda anywhere and sings with me to the Cars tape that’s been in his cassette deck forever.

His lips are slow, deliberate, languid against mine. Clumsy, almost, and searching.

I put my fingers in his hair. He sighs into my mouth.

I pull away.

“You taste really sweet,” I say, stupidly. It feels weird on my tongue; I don’t quite have a handle on my words—or my breathing, or anything else, for that matter—yet.

“It’s the Airheads,” Reed says, sounding just as breathless.

I nod. Then I kiss him again, or he kisses me.

This time I take both of his hands and pull them toward me. He’s a quick study, trailing my back before settling firmly on my hips, his fingers ghosting the patch of exposed skin between my skirt and the part of my top that’s ridden up.

I keep my hands clasped gently around his neck. His lips brush against my own one last time, lingering on my bottom lip, then he pulls back. “Look at you,” he says, and he presses his forehead to mine.

This yanks me back to earth, and briefly I wonder if it would be obvious on me, what we’ve been doing. The thought is more amusing than it is mortifying, and I start to laugh.

“What?” His eyes are wide, like he’s afraid he’s ruined everything.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s funny, this.”

And Reed gets it, because he starts laughing, too. Neither of us have moved an inch; he’s still pinned beneath me like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Before long, we’ve stopped laughing, stopped making any sound, stopped smiling altogether.

My hand is still cupped around his neck. Softly, and unhurried, he turns his head and kisses the inside of my wrist. He says my name. He leans in. His voice is faint, and it is the loveliest thing. “I want to—”

Light, hitting us a tad too abruptly, cutting into his words.

Mrs. Fredericks, the custodian, stands in the doorway. “I never lock this,” she’s muttering to herself. “These kids—” On cue, her eyes land on me, then on him, then on the compromising position we’ve got ourselves in.

Suddenly the obviousness isn’t so funny.

We spring apart. I jump off of Reed, straightening my top and pretending to dust my skirt off. He gets to his feet after me. In my haste, I knock over a pair of mops, which promptly tumble, quite loudly, onto the floor at our feet. Reed winces as he runs a hand through his hair to fix it, and in the sharpness of sunlight I can see just how disheveled I’ve made it. When he’s done I feel the slightest itch to mess it up all over again.

I open my mouth to explain, but then the bell goes off, signaling the end of lunch. The three of us keep silent and avoid eye contact as the ringing stretches on for what seems like eternity.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Mrs. Fredericks says as soon as it’s over. She’s usually so genial, but today she huffs and waves dismissively when we make a move to pick up the fallen mops. “Just go.”

“We were just—”

“Go on,” she repeats, her voice still raised, but not unkind. “Before I get you sent to the principal’s office, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Reed says, as he lifts his backpack off the ground and slings it over one shoulder. His movements are all fluidity and briskness once more. “Thank you.”

“We’re sorry!” I add as we leave.

Reed is handing me my knapsack, then he’s taking me by the hand and we’re flinging ourselves across hallways and staircases like we did earlier. I remember how he followed behind me without so much as a word, holding on like it was for dear life so we wouldn’t be separated. Unguarded and open. Patient when he had every reason not to be. Almost as if he had all the time in the world for me.

“I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt more alive,” Reed tells me, when we’re alone again.

“That scared the shit out of me!” I sputter at the same time.

We have a good laugh over this.

“Grace?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s something different about you,” he says after a while. “I hadn’t noticed.”

He asks me to meet him in the library after school. I say yes.

I find him in the periodicals section, arranging back issues of National Geographic dating as far back as the fifties. He’s back in the sweater—it’s always so cold here—and he appears to have ditched his contacts for the horn-rimmed glasses I always loved. When he sees me he leans against the shelf and gives me that tentative half-smile. “Hi,” he says.

My legs are wobbly and my arms are shivering, but I don’t think it’s the AC. “Hi.”

“I’m leaving for the summer,” he begins.

The first time around, I had asked where he was off to. I had complained about wasting away in town. Instead of “I’ll miss you,” I had said, “I think I’ll survive without you.”

Today I don’t do any of that.

Today, I say the only thing that really matters.

“I love you,” I tell him.

It hangs in the air between us. Reed removes his glasses, wipes them on his sweater, and puts them back on, like the routine will somehow help him make sense of things. But he and I both know it won’t, so I make things easy for him.

“I didn’t want there to be any confusion,” I say. “In case what happened this afternoon wasn’t enough of an indication.”

“Right.” He says it with mock-seriousness, but there’s nothing timid or unsure about the way he’s grinning now. “Of course. It’s important to clarify these things.”

When Reed doesn’t say anything more, I throw my hands up in pretend exasperation. “That’s it?” I demand. “Come on, Reed. Help me out here.”

“Well, what do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Something honest.”

“What,” and he tugs at his hair like he does when he’s embarrassed, “like the fact that you beat me to it? That I was planning out this whole stupid speech in my head and you managed to say it all for me in the simplest, most obvious way? That I think the world—and probably the rest of the Milky Way, and all the other galaxies—of you?” He slumps and slides down the shelf until he’s on the floor looking up at me. “I do.”

I plant myself next to him and put my head on his shoulder. “Was that the speech?”

“No.”

“Good. Who confesses their love and makes anguished declarations in a library?”

“You did. Like just now.”

I raise my head to look him in the eye. “Yours was better.”

His eyes are on my mouth. I take in the very little space once again surrounding us and feel my cheeks go hot. He moves closer still, like he’s going to kiss me, but then he stops as soon as our noses touch.

“Just so you know,” he says in my ear, hushed and low, “I’m not about to engage in displays of affection with you, public or otherwise, when I’m on duty at the library.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to.” I don’t mean for it to come out snippy, but it does. I’m actually disappointed.

“But,” Reed continues, ignoring me, “I’m off in ten minutes. And I get to lock up.”

He pulls the keys from his pocket and waves them in my face. I roll my eyes, but I make a mental note to text my mom that I’ll be home a little late.

Just a little.

Despite his new self-imposed rule, Reed sneaks a quick peck on my forehead. “So, I have a question,” he says when he pulls away.

“Yeah? What is it?”

He stands to get back to work on the magazines and extends a hand to help me up. “You got me curious when you were talking about us in the closet,” he says. “What do you think the future will be like?”

I start arranging some of the National Geographics myself. I pick up a copy from 1995 with Jane Goodall on the cover and put it where it belongs.

There’s the smallest part of me that aches to share all of it with him, and not just the part where we drifted. How I left college with a degree in American literature and wound up working at a thrift store in another town, putting off sending out applications for the jobs I actually wanted because I was secretly afraid of my life moving so fast that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. How, last I heard, he was in Portland, or was it Taipei, or was it Geneva, teaching little kids to swim or maybe writing a novel or maybe getting married. How hoverboards and self-lacing sneakers became a reality, but not quite in the way we thought they would. How a lot of things, really, didn’t go quite the way we thought they would.

But I don’t tell him any of it.

The library lights dimming around us, we tidy up the last of the magazines and find ourselves once again on the floor. I settle in close next to him. Neither of us is going anywhere just yet.

“Let’s find out together,” I say.

i just don't know where i can be found

i'm looking at job openings and i can already feel my chest tighten prematurely at the thought of meeting new people

i looked at xxx's and xxxxxx's tumblrs from when they were 21/22 and they were exactly the way i am at this very moment, idealistic and excited and eager to overshare, but it's still so them, the essence of them i mean, and it got me thinking about how someday i'll be 27 and the virtual world i live in, this safe space i've always had, will be vastly different and i'll be different too

i don't know how i feel about that

i'm scared i'll stop being this vocal about the things i love and i'm scared i'll stop caring about them altogether

a couple weeks ago i found out about an artist called bunny rogers and she wrote this

and like same

maybe i should get a job at phoenix publishing house because it's so close by and maybe i'll get a meghan daum/joanna rakoff-esque essay out of it

i keep reminding myself that christina kelly, definitive sassy magazine writer and ellegirl editor-in-chief, started out at footwear news

i'm about to watch and cry to titanic for the second night in a row

every so often i become obsessed with the histories of shipwrecks

2008 was the year i started becoming who i am now and i think i've always used it to measure the passage of time and this year it hit me just how short, and just how long, a decade actually is

in fact we're three years away from a whole new decade think about that

an afterword on emotional nakedness

After my last post I realized it marks the first time I’ve written about me and this boy in our twenties. “It’s so weird,” I said to Ella, when I was asking for her opinion on the piece. “We met when we were fourteen.”

In my words and hazy recollections we’d been frozen in time, rudderless teenagers doomed to make the same mistakes and have the same stilted conversations, never reaching a resolution of any sort. We were young adult fiction. He was always going to be the way I knew him: messy and insightful and naive and sweet and distant. His stepmother picked him up after school and he never took notes on homework so I had to remind him over Yahoo! Messenger. He owned a Zune and he wanted to borrow my Juno and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist DVDs. He started dating a girl over text messages and broke up with her (also over text messages) after a month. He was always taking a break from love, and he was always in love with somebody else. One day, we were going to open an all-ages music club.

I was eighteen when I’d last seen him. He wasn’t around for when I sank into depression, or when I got my first job and got published, or when I moved away from the only town I’d ever known as home. I don’t know anything about him or his life now, either. So to have found us there, four years later—eight years later, even—I was struck by the starkness. We’ve been coming of age completely independently from one another. We’ve reached the aftermath. We’re old enough to have had sex, to pay taxes, to live on our own. (Technically, of course.)

It reminded me of a conversation we had the summer before we became juniors in high school, a summer of review classes and college applications. I was so sure I’d had my life mapped out, but he was still having trouble seeing where he was going from there. His attitude about the whole thing was decidedly noncommittal and blasé. At one point he said he wanted to be a pilot. Or maybe a musician, who knew. “You don’t give a flying fuck about it,” I said to him, not a question. I wanted him to give a fuck. He told me, “Someday I will.”

I’m pretty sure that someday has come and gone. I’m pretty sure I missed it.

Because I’m a sucker, I romanticized the whole idea of it, I think. I imagined that I could understand what the characters in those self-indulgent movies about fumbling your way through adulthood and relationships from your past and present (About Alex, Celeste and Jesse Forever, etc.) are going through. I read essays from Chloe Caldwell and Melissa Broder and re-read All This Has Nothing to Do with Me and Mickey with an entirely new comprehension level. I even made a god damn playlist.

Which, again, is really new and really weird. I used to be able to appreciate these things as an outsider. I guess I just didn’t realize I’d be able to relate to them so soon, even in the most basic, fleeting sense. I’m in a brand new demographic and my life’s starting to reflect that.

A lot of my friends told me how much my moment of anti-clarity resonated with them and their own experiences, even if they differ in the specifics. I poke fun (and cringe) at the idea of “#relatable reads” and hugot culture, but there’s still really something about the universality of certain situations and emotions: “I get that.” I think that’s what I was trying to do, too, looking for solace and new perspectives in the creative work of other people.

From the Olena Kalytiak Davis poem “Kafka and Milena About to Meet in Vienna”:

when i last saw you
i handed you a poem in which you were already dead

when i last saw you
you misunderstood what i hadn’t yet just said 

when i last saw you
there was a blanket over my head
you said you knew where i lived 

the threshold and the backward glance
i am glad you aren’t here now

but (in the margins) i am also sad

not your face

only the way you walked away
through the tables in the café

From “Business, Yeah” by The Preatures:

I saw you on the street today, you were
looking worse off than I remember
When I held you in my hands, but man,
my hands didn’t understand what they were holding
And now I, I know you live it
I see it you live it
For me it’s just business
...
Do you walk around talking to me? Do you
still get that pain in your chest?
Does it make you nervous?

You might be thinking: “If you’re so over him, how are you still writing about him this way?” I don’t think it’s something so simply put. I’m still kicking myself over the way everything unfolded, but I don’t really want to go back in time and do it over. There are so many things I’ll never know for sure, but I’m holding on to the things I have found to be true. (Like the fact that he’s kept the wrong people around.) My need to get it all out is more about the circumstances than it is about a particular person.

 And I might have used him just to get some creative exploitation out of it.

Okay, okay, I definitely did.

These songs and books are showing me that I’m not alone in my momentary lapses of judgment and emotion and that I’m not being defensive. You don’t have to want something to miss it.

When I finished that essay I found that I still don’t write about anyone the way I write about him. That doesn’t mean anything, though, because everyone I’ve had a crush on Post-Him has been an acquaintance at best. Sometimes I wonder if I write about him differently, or if he would recognize himself at all in my paragraphs and verses. Thing is, I don’t quite think I even do anymore, myself.

I saw you last night and got that old feeling

Though sometimes you cross my mind from time to time, 

I don’t think that the stars are ours to have.

– Very Truly Yours, “Things You Used to Say”

As I left the house I saw that Melissa Broder, as her So Sad Today persona, had tweeted, “got over you but then saw you again.” I put my phone back in my pocket and tried not to view it as a sign.

I was in the middle of asking myself whether I really wanted to break my streak of not seeing you, not being around you, and not talking to you. It had been three years, five months, two weeks, and six days. (Approximately.) It was such a good run—I didn’t want to ruin that.

I didn’t particularly want to return to our high school after five years just to see an amateur production of Cinderella, either. I’d convinced myself that I was going for completely different reasons than having seen your name on the list of people attending. It was a fundraiser. It was an excuse to have a night out with friends; at least, the very, very few I’ve kept in touch with. I didn’t have anything better to do, except I did.

I had put on my favorite denim jacket and worn dark matte lipstick. (Not for you.) I had slicked on some eyeliner. (Not for you.) I had brushed my hair and made sure my neck smelled like peaches and apricots. (Not for you.)

During the play I sneak-studied for my English history exam and felt weird about familiarity and change, or lack thereof. When it was over I stood back, watched the crowd, and made myself invisible. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder for you.

You weren’t there, anyway.

Not until the very last minute, when I spotted the jacket that let people know you were going to medical school. You stood among your classmates from our senior class, fresh off a late lecture, I guessed. I could only see you from the back, but the second my eyes landed on you, I knew. You were already walking away.

“His hair is ridiculous,” I told Alyssa, when the doors closed behind you. (It is. Look at yourself. But whatever.) 

We ended up having dinner in the same restaurant across the street—it had been an entirely different place before we graduated. Separate tables, of course. You were upstairs, because there were probably twenty of you in your group, and downstairs I was relieved, because the room definitely would’ve been too small for the both of us. (Not to mention two of your ex-girlfriends.)

When the plates were cleared and the bill was paid I sat outside with my friends while they smoked. And because I’m being honest, here: I didn’t want to go without seeing you and saying hi.

Obviously, because history is doomed to repeat itself, I never got to. We always were awful at keeping up with each other, even within the same space, even at the right time. Looking back, it’s funny to me that it’s how things turned out. Like, was it ever going to be anything else? 

My back was turned to the restaurant entrance, so when Camille and Alyssa waved to someone leaving, I didn’t see who it was until it was too late. You were in a hurry, fishing your car keys out of your pocket, your glasses threatening to fall off your face. I watched you get into your car—now I’ll flinch every time I pass a black sedan. You wear glasses, I thought. You can drive, I thought. We’re not sixteen anymore, I thought, we’re twenty-two. You walked right past me, I thought.

You drove away. Gone again until who knows when. Oblivious as ever. Makoto Shinkai would be proud.

The girls and I took an Uber, and I didn’t care that the driver could hear me calling you an asshole. They dropped me off along Roosevelt, and my mind was still on you as I bought a cake from a family bakery and rode the jeepney home.

I wanted to leave you a voicemail. Isn’t that ridiculous? I wanted to call you and have your prerecorded message play and probably feel my breath hitch when I hear your voice and tell you everything in one long and nervous tirade after the beep. I wanted to confess. If only for the act itself, nothing more. I wanted to be reckless and loud and unapologetic.

But I couldn’t, because we don’t leave voicemails. And because I don’t have your number. So I settled for the next best thing, which was to send you a message request on Messenger (because we’re not Facebook friends, and fuck me if I sent you a friend request). I thought twice about adding an exclamation point. My finger hovered shakily over the little blue arrow as I told myself what a bad idea this was. My entire life was a bad idea.

I hit send.  

I said: Hey! This is probably gonna sound stupid, but I saw you tonight and we didn’t get to say hi and for some reason that bothered me. So. Hi, belatedly. Hope you’re well.

I immediately muted notifications.

I tweeted about what I’d done.

I went to check Alyssa and Camille’s messages, after which technology decided to betray me and let me know that you’d accepted the request and replied. The preview for your message flashed on the screen: you should’ve tapped me…

Shit. Shitshitshit. I locked my phone and put it away. I didn’t check it again until I was home, practically choking on the chocolate chiffon I’d bought.

You said: FIEL!! where did you see me? in the auditorium?

You said: Hello!! Long time no talk!

You said: hahaha

You said: you should’ve tapped me or something haha

I wanted to say: I’m on my period and I’m lonely and this irrational sentimental bullshit has nothing to do with you.

I wanted to say: You still owe me a mix CD.

I wanted to say: Do you remember when I told you I was starting to doubt the God you and I grew up with? “Don’t waver,” you said. I’m sorry. I don’t believe in any gods now, especially not the ones that take the shape of humans. I believe in a movement that’s bigger than all of us, and I believe that it exists out there in the greater scope of the Universe. Does that make any sense?

I wanted to say: You missed out. I was pretty.

In the end all I said was: It was nice seeing you.

Neither of us said anything after that.

We’re never going to get any closure, are we? Almost-relationships are the weirdest. Maybe there’s really just nothing to close. 

There have now been two nights in my life that involve booze, cheap cake, and a boy, blissfully unwitting. Sadness, also, but. There’s this strangest hyper-awareness that the earth is moving. I’ll live.

I was over you. I saw you again, and I still fucking am.

(All I ask is, this better not be a recurring theme in my life.)  

Here I was, dying inside, and they were talking about perpetual motion.

On fanaticism, girlhood, moving beyond, and the endless search for 

emptiness, prompted by my life's collision with Nicholas Hoult's.

At seventeen, I was invincible and stupid. 

I was a year out of high school and, having finally left behind the suffocating (and very limited) confines of my Catholic secondary education, I was eager to discover what else was out there for myself. I was reading over ten books a month. I was writing poetry almost compulsively. I was exploring my city and getting mugged and learning to love both train rides and walks home. I was starting to become preoccupied with planning and putting together a webzine with a small team composed of my friends, which in a couple of months would become Elision, its name picked out of a list of obscure music terms, referring to the occurrence in which a note begins where another note ends.

I hadn’t fucked up my life yet, but I would. 

I wasn’t dating or rounding up the requisite vices of a reckless youth—not for a lack of trying, mind you. That kind of thing just didn’t come naturally to me, I guess. It still doesn’t. Instead, like a true-blue loser, I busied myself with a slew of come-and-go fixations, live music, bands, and the internet. My days turned into a series of hotel lobbies, fiction and indiscretion, and close encounters, too close, with false heroes who no longer matter to me as much, if at all. Years have passed since I deleted their music.

This part of my life is very well documented. I feel like it’d be redundant at this point to recount it all here, and, if I’m being honest, downright embarrassing, although I know it sort of makes no sense without context to the people who have no idea what I’m talking about. But I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. I miss my friends most of all. “Look at our lives,” we’d say in jest, echoing some cyber-phrase we had learned off of Tumblr back when it was socially acceptable to be on it. “Look at our choices.” 

And I do look at them now, and I think, Well, shit. All those horrible decisions. All that wasted time. 

But what’s a past self if not the most ideal recipient of a swift kick in the face? 

The friends I made on the internet because they liked the same bands that I did, we’ve come to look back on these days as though we were buddies who’d been through war. We were, for lack of a better word, part of a scene. It felt at the time like it would never end, but a subculture—especially one rooted in music—was always going to be ephemeral, a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. Eventually, of course, we were pulled apart by differing interests, college, and whatever else. For me, I suppose, it was Elision and having outgrown the very musicians I once cried over and claimed I would love for the rest of my life. Somehow, we turned into our very own “Where are they now?” 

We began to think of ourselves as “veterans” of a dying movement. We’d seen it all and done it all. We were growing up and we were ready to move on. 

*

When I think of the year I turned seventeen, I look at it in terms of markers—what I was listening to, what I was obsessed with, what I loved. One of these things was Nicholas Hoult. 

I first became truly conscious of who he was two years earlier when I found him in an issue of Teen Vogue. I remember finding it endearing that he’d had no idea who Tom Ford even was, aside from his cameo in Zoolander, before filming A Single Man. The article mentioned that he’s 6’3”, and in the accompanying photo, his pale blue jacket and the sky around him brought out the color of his eyes. 

That was the year I really started paying attention to Skins, already a couple of years too late. I had been too young and a little too un-hip to have been able to fully appreciate it at the time of its original release. His turn as Tony Stonem, the Sartre-reading, choir-singing, ambiguously bisexual (and equally ambiguously sociopathic) antihero with a heart of gold, gave me all kinds of epiphanies. 

He became Hank McCoy, he read a Nick Hornby audiobook and did funny voices, and he played a zombie in love. In real life, he was shy, sweet, and self-deprecating. He was the ultimate: this impossible dreamboat, this great ideal, on whom I projected my hopeless teenybopper admiration. He would never be within my reach. 

Magazines I’d read had called his type “cotton candy.” You could fall in love with him, and you could move on with your life. 

So when it was announced that Nick was coming to Manila for AsiaPOP Comicon, I was, as the kids say, shook. 

I found myself weeks later in a hotel lobby, alone and uncertain. Call it a Fangirl’s Lament: How do I unlearn the obsessive tendencies that anchor me to overemotion? How do you like something casually without needing to experience more? The days leading up to the Con and Nick’s arrival had come and gone, leaving me an unruly, unraveling bundle of nerves. This combination of excitement and unease manifested physically—I could feel it at the tips of my fingers, and dead center in my chest. The weirdness of it all settled over me and clung to my skin. 

Like I said, I was “retired.” I’d left that life behind a long time ago. My old crew was gone; when I asked my friends to come with me for old times’ sake, none of them were free. Four years ago, I didn’t even have to ask. I was too old for this shit, I no longer belonged. Well-adjusted, stable adults did not go to hotels to orchestrate meet-cutes with the boys of their girlhood dreams. I knew this, and yet at that moment I had become very convinced that I must take a photo of Nick on film. To do that, I needed to rely on old habits and attempt to make it happen. 

But the whole time I was there all I did was ask myself, “What am I doing here?”

My exploits as a teen superfan had never been so existential. 

I walked out of there at half past noon with nothing to show for it. I wasn’t disappointed—I was relieved. My body lagged with the after-effects of an unwarranted adrenaline rush that went to waste. I could live with it, but the blue-moon aspect of the situation, almost farcical in its far-fetched reality, followed me around. This was never going to happen again, and I’d be foolish to let it pass me by.

I needed closure. 

Before I knew it, I was standing second in line for a photo session with Nick, having spent over two thousand bucks for the assurance and the opportunity. All around me were people in costume. Talk about surreal: I was psyching myself up, telling myself that I was really doing this, in the presence of an inflatable velociraptor and the Winter Soldier and a Power Ranger and Prince Gumball and Jubilation Lee and BoJack Horseman. Cons are something else. 

What took place after has been playing and replaying on a loop in the back of my mind since that day, always happening, happening, happening in its own little Groundhog Day universe, so I’m going to write the next part in the present tense. 

The photo session starts fifteen minutes early. My first real glimpse of Nicholas Hoult arrives in the form of a silhouette, seen through the sheer black curtain of the makeshift booth. The ushers set the curtain aside to prepare for the oncoming chaos, and there he is. His eyes are blue even from where I’m standing, several feet away. I let out a “Holy shit” without realizing, and the chatty usherette guiding me goes, “Same!” and high-fives me. 

When it’s my turn, Nick gets into a faux fighting stance and motions me over, all silliness and charm. The first thing he does when I get to his side is literally pull me into a hug, romance novel clinch cover-style. (It’s at this point that my sanity and composure go out the window.) Note that I’m not allowed to touch him unless he touches me. His shirt feels very soft under my fingers—that much I will remember clearly. He untangles himself from me and says, “Hello, how are you?” 

And I swear I can’t answer for five seconds. 

I’m so far gone that the automatic “I’m doing well, how are you?” failed to initiate in my faulty system. “This is so surreal for me, I’m sorry,” I tell him when I remember how to speak. “I’ve loved you since Skins.” I rehearsed this moment probably a hundred times from the second I was made aware that it could happen. And here I am, fucking it up spectacularly. Still, he tilts his head, body language for I’m flattered, and says, “Aw, thank you so much.” From the delivery, I get the feeling that he means it, even though he’s probably used to it. 

I start to tell him that I loved his Happy, Sad, Confused podcast episode, to let him know I’m not messing around, but he cuts in and asks me what my name is. 

You have to understand. I decided early on not to bother saying my name unprompted, because it wouldn’t matter, anyway. No celebrity I’ve ever met, save for William Beckett, has ever asked me for my name, not even when signing autographs. And now Nicholas Hoult is looking at me, waiting to know what I’m called. It feels so, so nice.

“Fiel,” I croak. 

“Fiel,” he says back. 

We take the photo. Then another. The flash is disorienting. I thank him profusely. I have zero presence of mind. I think I mutter, “See you around.” Which is absolutely ridiculous. I’m never seeing him again. 

It’s over before I know it, of course. 

It will never be over, of course. 

The realizations and regrets hit me as soon as I walk out of the booth and claim my glossy picture. They come to me, at first in singular bursts, then all at once. Not enough eye contact—I’m the worst at it. I never got to ask him about his favorite book, or his favorite Salinger. I might have walked away too soon. The light glinted off my glasses unflatteringly in the photo, and I can’t ever re-do it or fix it. I was already forgetting details: what it was like to look into his eyes up close, the sound of his accent, how it felt to have his head resting in the crook of my neck. 

I was alone. I didn’t have this to look forward to anymore. I didn’t have any war buddies that knew exactly what I was feeling. I was empty, all too suddenly. 

I took the bus home and didn’t dare attempt to make any sense of it. 

*

When I got home from my first day on my first real job, I cried at the dinner table. 

“Why are you crying?” my mom asked, more out of amusement than anything. I had no answer, and to this day I still don’t. I think it had to do with the idea, plain as day, that my life was changing, and I couldn’t hold on to the comfortable constants I’d grown attached to. I couldn’t hide behind ignorance anymore. I was just overwhelmed and exhausted. But it also had to do with the fact that something huge and something wonderful had just happened, and now I didn’t know what to do with myself. All the overthinking and mixed feelings were getting to me. 

Whatever it was, I’m almost certain it was the same reasoning that prompted me to cry, once again at the dinner table, when I got home from meeting Nicholas Hoult. 

Sometimes I almost wish it never happened, that APCC never brought him here in the first place. If you had asked seventeen-year-old me to list things more likely to happen to twenty-one-year-old me than being within zero inches of Nick Hoult, she would have said things like going to the moon or winning the lottery, and she would have been convinced that she wasn’t lying. It was too real, too much, and it left me drained. 

It gets me thinking, now that I’m older, would it always be this way? What if I’m just setting myself up for disappointment every time? Every good thing is probably just escapism in disguise: thirty seconds of brilliance followed by a lifetime of disillusionment.

Then I snap out of it and tell myself: You’ve conversed with Nicholas Hoult! Nicholas Hoult knows your name! Then I snap out of that and tell myself: There’s an entire universe out there. 

I think it’s easy to read this piece and write it off as shallow and juvenile. I’m already doing it, myself. But I also think people shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the emotions experienced by anyone who’s ever loved something fanatically—it’s not being irrational, it’s being unflinchingly honest. Unrestrained. Real. And nobody should ever have to apologize for that, even if it does make us do some pretty screwed-up things.

Maybe I’ll never attain that level of “chill” that allows me to gush over my obsessions without being so emotionally vulnerable all the time. Maybe I’ll never learn to contain what I feel. Maybe next year I’ll be writing this exact same essay about someone else. Maybe I’ll never be too old for any of it, not really. And maybe I don’t really want to be. 

*

Before entering the booth for the photo session with Nick, I left the voice recorder app running on my phone and snuck it into my back pocket while the ushers reiterated that we weren’t allowed to bring anything in. 

I listened to it afterwards. He was so soft-spoken that his voice hardly registered. It makes me think of The Day the Dancers Came, and sometimes I imagine how I would lose the recording. I could accidentally delete it. I could lose track of where to listen so I’d understand what he was saying. I could stop caring altogether, and it wouldn’t matter what happened to it.

The audio is a mess of squealing fans, idle chatter, and white noise. The first time I heard it, I almost thought Nick wasn’t on it at all. But if I strain and really listen for his voice, I can just barely make out that nanosecond in which he spoke my name. 

No matter what I do, it comes and goes fast, and for a second I’m dazed and disappointed all over again. But for what it’s worth, I’ve come to appreciate it for what it is: a beautiful, imperfect, endless moment, now gone. 

It’s the best euphemism for getting the living crap kicked out of you that I’ve ever heard.

I was seven years old when Rico Yan died, gone to sleep and never to wake up again, aged twenty-seven and fresh off the immense success of Got to Believe! 

He’s been gone fourteen years. I barely remember anything, to be honest. But somehow, his impact on me remains, and it’s as great and painful as ever. I have no idea why, but the void he’s left is still unfilled, and in my head, his presence is still really vivid. 

In some ways, this was my first true brush with the experience of death, how tragic and unbelievable it can be, how bad its timing is. How it can affect a person. Maybe that’s why. 

*

I was ten when my mom pointed to River Phoenix on television and said, offhand and matter-of-fact, “Oh, that boy is dead.” Stand by Me was on HBO, and I watched that cigarette-smoking kid with his sleeves rolled up and his vulnerability fluctuating with strange fascination, because I couldn’t comprehend that he was right there, and he was also gone. 

I would see him years later, in The Thing Called Love, one of his last films, also on HBO. He was all grown up. He brooded even more than he did as Chris Chambers. He played guitar and sang softly, somberly. He was beautiful. “He’s dead,” my mom reminded me, sounding slightly sadder this time, her voice conveying the sayang of it all. 

In the years that followed I would exhaust River’s filmography and learn more about him than I ever had any business knowing. I would listen to his songs and delude myself into thinking that I understood him. The more alive—the more flawed—he seemed, the higher I put him on a pedestal. But I never quite forgot the fact that came before the rest: He’s gone. And call me morbid, but that only pushed my infatuation further.   

*

I was thirteen when Entertainment Tonight aired a visual obituary for Heath Ledger. I had never seen a single film of his; the most I ever heard of him was through a pop culture reference Meg Cabot made on All-American Girl. I started off detached and slightly curious, but I was a blubbering mess by the end of it. He had one of the nicest smiles I had (still have) ever seen. 

I fell into a routine: I made my dad buy me a VCD of 10 Things I Hate About You at the now-defunct Video City in SM North that I watched every day after school. I drew a black ribbon on my hand to signal my mourning; I’d refill it when it faded and draw it on again after it washed off. I read Wuthering Heights because Heath and his sister had been named after the central characters. When I got older, I started putting “The Weakness in Me” by Joan Armatrading on and walking around bookshops, pretending he was following me with a copy of The Feminine Mystique, as normal people are wont to do. 

But when I think of him, I think mostly of Patrick Verona and William Thatcher, and with that I do him a disservice, again and again and again.

*

It was around that same time when I was thirteen, my Heath Era, that I found Charlie Bartlett among a pile of pirated DVDs at North Ridge Plaza. The poster looked cool: skinny kid looking smug, doodles all around his head, Kat Dennings, pre-Iron Man/comeback Robert Downey, Jr. 

At this age I had begun testing the waters of nonconformity and embracing weird uncoolness. Charlie Bartlett sold prescription drugs to people at his school and was cheerful to a fault, unlike broody, moody me, but he was a wiry, vibrant outsider who was never anyone else but himself, and I found comfort in that. 

It was also around this time that I bought a back issue of CosmoGIRL! that featured Anton Yelchin—Charlie Bartlett himself. He was eighteen. He talked and made quick jokes (no doubt spoken in his signature animated tone) about taking pictures (he would end up getting a better camera than his late-2000s phone and get really, really good), buying vinyl (another factor that made me want to start my own collection), and sleep (he certainly looked the part). “Confidence is a big thing with [Charlie],” he had said. “He never feels like he has to be certain things for certain people.” 

I was pretty much a goner. I followed his career pretty closely after that: in New York, I Love You as a teen going to prom; in Middle of Nowhere as a lonely amateur drug seller; in Like Crazy as a young man in love and other things that resemble it; in Only Lovers Left Alive as a rock-and-roller with a healthy dose of naivete; in Rudderless as a musician with Fabrizio Moretti-like charm; and in 5 to 7 as a struggling writer who has an affair with an older married woman. And the ones that came before, like the brilliant, difficult Fierce People, and the better known titles, too. He could inhabit characters like, well, crazy. 

He became a constant, an omnipresent comfort. I’d been counting the days until I could see Green Room, and whatever else. There was going to be so much else. 

So when I woke up this morning, checked Twitter, and saw that a friend had tweeted: WHY !!!! DID !!!! ANTON !!!!!! YELCHIN! !!!!!! DIE!!!!!!!!! for the briefest of seconds I thought maybe, just maybe, she had seen a movie. Maybe it was even Green Room. Maybe I’d just been spoiled. 

I’m not going to repeat to you what you already know. I can’t.  

I went to sleep a mere thirty minutes Before. I’d been watching a film in which two sisters were hosting a party, not knowing that their mother was dying in a car crash. They looked so happy, so unaware, that it made me cringe. I never want to be in that position, I decided. 

The funny thing was, ironically, right at that moment, I was. 

My cousin texted me to ask what the hell had happened. That’s when it really hit me. We had discovered Charlie Bartlett together, come to think of it, and have had a joint obsession over Anton forever, I’m just realizing. It’s hard sometimes to convince her to see a certain movie that I love, but I only have to mention his name once to get her to agree. 

Rudderless is a hard film to watch on its own, heartbreaking, and it only gets worse with repeats. Of course, this only makes me like it even more. And now there’s this added layer of heartbreak—I almost feel like never seeing it again. In the 7-Eleven near where I work, I made the mistake of thinking it would be fine to listen to the songs Anton had performed on the soundtrack, where he sang lines like You’re so emotional...guess what, the music never stops, and It’s a long way down/Even longer way back up. 

I was so wrong. But, hey, my New Year’s resolution had been crying in public whenever I damn well liked.  

In the beginning it was odd even to me that this loss hurts this much, that it’s getting to me this deep. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. All of it was so abrupt. He was so talented, and so real, and so unlike anyone else. He was so young. He would never be twenty-eight. 

And once more it doesn’t compute in my head, which seems to be stuck in denial mode right now. 

I just had to get this off my chest, I think. Someday maybe I’ll write about him and do him justice. But for now I think I need to process.