Tell Me Something Real

“Isn’t this what you want?” he asks.
I tug his shirt, bringing him closer. “Yes, and you.”

“Everything is behind me,” I say. “Everything.”

I need him on a cellular level. When he kisses me, I swallow my grief. I speak with my body, the only language I truly understand.

And here is this boy, who acts like he spent his life with a map and I’m the buried treasure.

There’s something inescapable about abandonment, an ever-present feeling of dread, an edge. I want to take his hand, to walk side by side in our grief, but there’s something else about being unwanted: It leaves you feeling completely alone.

My heart isn’t big enough, my stomach strong enough. Worry is one thing, but grief another. Anguish morphs into a new species of desperation, carnivorous. My tears come from so deep inside me that I think I’ll cough up organs, essential parts of my body that I need to survive. I’ve held it all in, not just the tears, but the down-in-my-stomach vomit-inducing pain. I’ve been saving it for him, the one person I can count on to truly understand.

But tonight as I stand next to him, all I see are the other people strolling past. I wonder who else is suffering a loss. It used to be so easy thinking that I was the only one hurting. Now I realize how we all carry pain, how our lives can be turned inside out in an instant—a diagnosis, a break-up, a death.

Caleb is more than a buffer, more than a human painkiller. He helps me walk into the pain—not around it.

“No one can do that for me. No one can tell me who I am going to be now that I’m better. I don’t know what’s going to happen—just that every decision matters.”

Caleb is more than a distraction. When he holds my hand, he reminds me that I have fingerprints and nerves have endings. A gesture, a touch, can be as important as words.