Him

A Short Story

He was in a place where he couldn’t distinguish what he needed from what he wanted. In fact, he often confused the two in awfully consequential ways. I think that’s why I was first drawn to him. He represented the great “what if?” He was what could have been in the dull routine that was my life. More importantly he represented the very definition of art. For the first time, I realized that the existential and introspective angst I inevitably suffered by being a 16 year old was a shared affliction. See, the main difference between him and me was that he saw that all of us were drowning in the same pool of confusion that is growing up. He was what opened my eyes to the realization that I was not alone.

Let me start from the beginning. I categorize people into those who want to understand how people work and those who want to change how people work. Neither is necessarily mutually exclusive, but the latter is far more dangerous. He was both.

I like the beginning of this story more than the end. I think that’s because at the beginning, the story is already flushed out in your head. There are countless options as to how the story might play out and as it progresses, those options grow increasingly smaller until it’s played out the way it has. I guess that’s the way life works. Maybe that’s the beauty of youth; the future is undefined. He was never meant to be anything more than a pretty face I passed by in the halls one day and couldn’t look away from. He was always meant to be a personification of the experiences I would live only in my mind and never in real life. 

This isn’t a love story. Not in the traditional sense at least. I think of this as more of an adventure. Maybe if it was a movie, it’d be considered a coming-of-age film and some gorgeous former Disney star who looked nothing like me would play the main character and some equally gorgeous heartthrob would play him and the ending would be beautiful and free of run on sentences. But, this is not that.

It all started when he came up to me. We were staring at the same painting in the art gallery at school and he asked me what I saw.

“I see a girl,” I said.

“I see affliction,” he said.

I didn’t have to ask for an explanation for him to start.

“Affliction feeds art. See I’m like you. I can’t stop staring at this painting, but unlike you, I know exactly why.” 

“Please share.”

“Because you feel like you’re a part of something when you look at this. Because this artist feels pain. And when you look at this painting, you realize you’re not the only one with this kind of hurt. You’re not alone anymore. And the moment you look away, you might forget that someone else is trying as desperately as you are to describe this pain. To share it with someone who might get it.”

All I could do was look at him with a sort of metaphorical jaw drop. The next few months were characterized by a general sort of staring at him. I studied his face intensely like I was scared he might disappear. 

The weird thing is, we shared this mutual understanding of things that didn’t need to be said. So much of what I craved came from the fact that I didn’t know how to say the thoughts that swirled around in my head too fast for me to think straight. But to him, I never needed to because he already knew.

I craved him for the exact same reason that I didn’t know what I was craving. He was a mystery and it became my mission to solve it. I realize now, I was asking for the impossible. Maybe that’s exactly why I asked for it.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked me two months later as we stood outside an abandoned factory. God, I wish I could have answered his question honestly. I was afraid of him. No, not him, but everything he stood for. His ability to read me in a split second when it took me an eternity to even begin to understand his mind. Getting to know him terrified me. It was like reading a really good book with a beautiful cover; trying relentlessly to get to the next page, but never wanting it to end. It was the paradox that he presented in my desires that scared me the most. But I think in that instance, the thing I was truly afraid of was the sudden realization that he was about to change me.

By stepping through the window of the abandoned factory, I signed a contract to step into a world that didn’t belong to me. I was never the kind of girl who ventured outside her reality that consisted of home and school. I liked the comfort of my routine until one day I began to crave discomfort. I found myself longing for discontinuity. He became the monkey-wrench in my mundane life. He had the audacity to waltz in and show me what I was missing. But maybe it wasn’t his right to do that.

Finally, I entered the factory. For a long time it was silent. The only thing I could hear was the clicking of his camera. He insisted on using an old camera with black and white film and nothing else. If you asked him, he would tell you that the limited frames caused him to focus on what mattered. This method was second only to not taking any pictures at all. 

“Only experiences deserve to be in color” he told me that day. 

We climbed to the roof of that factory a few days later.

We rode the wind like stars looking at the sun in awe at its relevance. He looked at me and I was aware of my breath encircling the light in front of me. 

“The sun,” he said “Is not the biggest star in the sky,”

“It’s just the most loved.”

He smiled out of the corner of his mouth with that crooked picture frame of a face the way he did when his mind raced.

“Does that make you the sun?” I asked. He pressed his lips against my forehead.

“No.”

 He drifted to a foreign country trapped behind his eyes. I so desperately wanted to see where he went off to every so often. His face turned from the future to the now and he showed me.

“That makes me the Universe.”

I didn’t get it at first. Others might have found it pretentious, the way he constantly spoke in metaphors. But I think he liked watching me try to figure out what he meant. And I think I liked that he liked that.

I realize now that he was just as desperate to express himself as I was. I realize now, that he liked me because I was willing to try to understand him. At certain points, I think I truly did. The days were soaked in smiles. He was the universe. He wanted me to see him as more than just one star. More than just one aspect of his personality and his mind, he wanted me to see the whole universe that was him. It terrified him that I might be blinded by the sun and never see the expanse of the night sky. His theory was that our deepest conversations occurred at night because that is when we had the most perspective and nothing was more of a drug than the perspective of everything that is and ever was and ever would be. So it was decided that that’s when most of our meetings would occur.

“That’s the problem,” he told me one night when I had snuck out of my window to meet him at a swing set just a little while down the road. 

“Everyone always asks about your favorite color or song or movie. And we all try so hard to narrow the unlimited list of good colors and songs and movies to just one. And somehow, we feel like this choice defines us. We’re so obsessed with the number one. We want to be the best at anything and everything and we only want the best. From the moment we’re born we’re divided into a category: boy or girl. From there, we’re tall or short, smart or dumb, pretty or ugly, good or bad. But the things is, we only ever get to be one or the other. I feel like I’m nothing without a string of one word labels that when put together define me. But that’s not who I am at all, right?” 

That was the first time he ever asked me to confirm his affirmation. It occurred to me that I had glorified him to the point where I had forgotten that maybe in his infinite confidence there were cracks of uncertainty. That maybe he didn’t have it all figured out. In that moment, under that starry sky, I was helping him find answers just as much as he was helping me find mine.

“I think there is so much that we don’t understand, so we divide and subdivide our intellectual complexities into categories to try to make sense of them. Maybe, there aren’t enough words out there to perfectly describe our identity. And I think that makes us uncomfortable, so instead we wear name tags and create labels and call it good enough.”

That was the moment I tried to capture in my mind. It still sits there so vividly. I never wanted to forget the way he smiled at me. In between all of the words we exchanged were long moments of silence and those were the loudest of them all.

Then winter came, and everything got cold, even him. Even me.

I got caught sneaking out. I knew it was wrong. I always frowned down upon girls who got so invested in a guy that they broke the trust of people like their parents in the name of blind devotion. But this was different, I told myself. So I found new ways to get out and see him. I found myself wanting him more than anything. 

I started writing music. I stopped being so scared of the long hallways at school and started realizing that everyone may have been just as scared as I was. I stopped letting fear or expectations hold me back. I joined the drama club and dropped out of the intensive science classes that I only took because that’s what my dad wanted. I started reading books just for fun and introducing myself to strangers. I started making to-do lists and actually checking off all of the items. I started becoming my own universe. Most importantly, I started recognizing myself every time I looked in the mirror.

I attributed all of this to him. He was like a drug and being with him kept me high. I needed him, at least I thought I did. And I was determined to give him whatever he needed from me. So when he showed up at my window one cold night in January covered in bruises, I was there.

“I need you,” he said.

I pulled him inside. 

His body was weak and something inside him was broken.

He told me about a girl he had known. We had all known her. She was the life of the party. The epitome of beauty and kindness and popularity. He told me that she was covered in paint just like the rest of us. She was terrified of the piranhas that swam around high school, alone they were harmless and small, but together they had the power to completely devour a person in the most painful way. He told me that behind her perfectly white teeth that she proudly displayed, she was tormented. She had become a master at faking smiles. She had fallen victim to the phrase “I'm fine” and that she had forgotten that her afflictions were shared. 

“She was tormented by the single worst feeling that exists: loneliness,” he said as we sat on my bedroom floor at 2:46am.

“She was fake and the worst part is, she became aware of it. She realized nobody knew who she really was. Not her friends, not her parents, not even she knew who she was.” 

He looked at me. The look sent shivers down my back. It was something I had never seen before. He looked as though his eyes were made of shattered glass that reflected only broken fragments of reality.

“How can someone be so loved and yet so destroyed by her own perfection?” He asked me. Well, I don’t think he wanted an answer.

I finally asked him what happened.

“She worked so hard to become exactly what everyone wanted to see that when she finally achieved it, she realized that’s not at all what she wanted.”

“She’s gone,” he whispered. 

Gone.

She’s gone. 

The words echoed in my head. I never knew her personally, but it seemed to me that it was enough to simply know of her.

“What’s left when you realize nobody really knows you? How terrifying is it to realize that you don’t know yourself? How much patience are you supposed to have? She’s missing. Maybe she’s on a bus headed somewhere better or maybe she’s dead somewhere. But, she’s gone.”

I never asked him where he got the bruises.

“But people are never really gone are they?” He asked after a long moment of silence. I hadn’t known what to say, but it seemed to me like silence is exactly what he needed.

“She’s still here,” he said pointing to his head. “They’ll keep talking about her even though physically, she could be anywhere else. And doesn’t that make her just as here as she always was?”

“Growing up is hard,” I said.

“No. Existing is hard,” he said. 

That was the last time I ever saw him. I remember walking to the swings with him and that’s where they found me the next day, except they never found him.

They took me to the hospital and it was all a big blur. Doctors plugged tubes into my arms to try to warm me up, but they said the bruises covering my body were harmless. The real threat came from the hypothermia. I remember asking for him. I don’t know why I’d never mentioned him to anyone before. Maybe I liked the idea of having a secret as exciting as the universe that he was.

The next day, they introduced me to a nice lady with a lab coat and beautiful hair.

That was the day they told me that he didn’t exist.

They said I had something called schizophrenia. They said I was crazy and they handed me a bottle of pills and a series of appointments. That was the day everything changed. They said my hallucination almost killed me by compelling me to pass out in the middle of a freezing night without telling anyone where I was. As much as they asked where I got the bruises from, I couldn’t remember. The only things I could remember about the past few months were the way his nose crinkled when he had an idea or the sound of his hushed voice on those countless nights.

I didn’t believe them at first until weeks passed and he never came. And nobody knew of anyone by his name. He wasn’t in the school directory or in the yearbook. The address he gave me as his home had been in foreclosure for years, they said. He wasn’t anywhere. He wasn’t anything or anyone. 

I guess their job was to make sure my crazy was contained. I guess in essence their task was to make sure I never did see him again. I guess the little red pills did that already. They kept me at the hospital for a while, making sure I wasn’t dangerous. I couldn’t blame them. Before they finally let me go home, they told me I should write him a letter, so I did:

Dear you,

You once told me you liked my thoughts. It's funny how we take credit for our thoughts. We're praised for these things that come out of us as if we created them. To me thoughts seem almost like visitors, things that come and go and we are given the choice of whether or not to take a picture of that visitor or introduce that visitor to someone else. They feel foreign, exciting, and it's amazing what kinds of things can control them. I think about you a lot. And I get such a physical response. It's been like that for a while. I used to feel my pulse. When it was elevated, I would know that I was thinking about you. You sneak in because I willingly leave the door open. You're like water making its way through the floor panels in everything I do. I know you’re not real, but I don’t know who I would be if I hadn’t met you. I realize now that I’m not alone, I’m a part of a beautiful army of lost souls. We all are. I'm not blinded by the sun anymore. You were never the Universe, I was.

Sincerely,

Me