"So I walked through to the haze
And a million dirty waves,
Now I see you lying there
Like a lilo losing air,
Black rocks and shoreline sand,
Still dead summer I cannot bear,
And I wipe the sand from my arms."
-Foals, Spanish Sahara
two things to know before you read this:
1) this song takes the chapter to a whole new level. listen to it.
2) i wrote this chapter on one of the worst days of my life. because of this, i would appreciate it if you would resist the urge to make any stupid jokes in the comments. for example: a line in here refers to "ashton's size". it is clear in the surrounding context that this is nothing sexual. if you make any inappropriate jokes i will block you without a second thought. thank you.
l.h.
Ashton was always something completely intangible.
All those months ago when he first sat down to talk to me, back when I spent every other day out on that curb giving people the light of day who had had been ingrained with the idea that they didn't deserve it. When he came to me, breathless and heaving for air like he had been running miles and miles before he finally reached me. When he spoke a million words a minute, never relaxing enough to stop looking behind him, like he were expecting someone to jump out around the corner and grab him. Waves of horror had carried him straight to me. That much was clear.
I remember feeling something that day. Something heavy settling in the pit of my stomach, like I had finally gotten a glimpse into the daily trepidations of those around me. It was the first time I realized that I wasn't the only one who suffered. I realized that the people around me faced their own anxieties and personal anguish; I wasn't alone. Yet I had always felt that way, behaved that way. Even what I did with that sign was always some level of self-seeking on my part: using other people's misfortunes to justify the notion that no one would ever understand my pain.
Every day that I was out there I waited for someone to come along with the same story as me. And it wasn't for the empathy; I didn't want someone that would be able to fathom each ineffable feeling I had felt along the way, who understood what it felt like to lose everyone you loved to unavoidable circumstances. Everything in my life had been one giant snowball effect. All I wanted was to know that my agony was valid: that I had truly experienced a never-before seen form of nature's torment.
I thought that I had it worse than anyone.
The day that he showed up with his face all bloodied and scabbed over simply because his dad had been in the wrong place at the wrong time was the day I realized that it was never a competition. He changed me.
The problem, however, stood to be that the people who change you are by no guarantees good people, and it wasn't fair to Ashton or to me to expect that they were.
That word that Miles used to describe him had bounced around my head for days and days after he said it.
Manipulative.
It's simply part of the human condition to believe that the people you care about are wholy good. This is because acknowledging the fact that the people you love aren't perfect would mean admitting that you are not perfect. And though most of us already know this, it's the kind of thing that you fold up and tuck away, only acknowledged because society tells us that we need to. We excuse it by saying: well, no one's perfect. And that's true. No one is. But we all have a quiet sense of superiority around those that we don't like.
So what happens when you find that someone you love is also someone that you don't like?
Ultimately, Ashton's size was so abstract it's what made him so intangible. He was simply so much greater than anything I had ever known and I could not, for the life of me, figure out what to do with that.
Bottom line, my childhood sucked--and because I had become accustomed to this shitty life I'd lead, mediocrity felt like a gift wrapped in gold and glitter by God himself. So I accepted it. I accepted friends that only liked me when I was pumped full of Prozac, and I accepted a lame job that didn't mean anything to me, and I accepted a girlfriend who never loved me as much as she loved telling me that she did. Ashton wasn't mediocre. He was the untouchable dream: constantly dangling in front of me, just out of my reach.
He was the wake-up call that said: hey, buddy--it's time to stop pretending that this is your life.
I had spent months and months sewing myself into this story: one where I had good friends and a loving girlfriend and a job that I looked forward to every day. This gray area that held me like a safety net: one that protected me from further suffering.
Then Ashton came along. And what did he do?
He hurt me in a way I'd never been hurt before.
"Like I need to poster-child for pathetic to give me a lesson in dignity."
When your brother kills himself, and your other brother loses himself in substance abuse, people will spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around you just to make sure you don't follow their lead. No one knows how to deal with you when you internalize everything you've ever truly felt.
Ashton didn't treat me like a minefield, calculating each move he made with both precision and accuracy. He wasn't afraid of setting me off. He came from a world where everyone suffered: one where you put on your big-boy pants and you dealt with the fact that life didn't always favor you. That's what made him so terrifying.
Ashton wasn't just greater than Earth--he was greater than the observable universe in its entirety. He was something I had never seen before. An enigma that I would never quite crack the code to.
So to see him with his guard completely down was something I felt like I had to tiptoe around.
His head rested in my lap as he slept, yet he held onto my hand as tightly as he did when he was awake. I didn't bother wake him once he fell asleep, because there simply wasn't anything he could say that could change what had happened. Sully--the only part of this life that wasn't entirely fraudulent--had died. My best friend was gone at only twenty-two years old. You cannot reverse that with any number of kind words, or sweet promises.
Cassie was not the kind of girl that withheld many secrets. She was not a puzzle I had to solve. She was an open book with no real content. She was mediocre at best, no different than millions of other girls on the planet. Ashton, however, was a puzzle that lead to a labyrinth that lead to another puzzle and another labyrinth and so on and so forth. He was impossible. Confusing. Otherworldly.
Intangible.
The predicament was that I felt that I had learned my lesson.
Ashton called me out. He told me that I was pathetic--the most pitiful, indignant piece of shit he had met in his entire life so far. Then--bam. He was gone. I suffered for days, alone, moping, and pathetic, just like he had anticipated. I was getting my shit together. I was dealing with the fact that my best friend was dying, and I was slowly realizing that I couldn't stay here once he was gone. My life in New York was counterfeit. A page in the middle of a book I never even meant to read.
Sully died, and that was the final crack of the whip. I would cry about him for a few days and then I would be forced to move on like I did when Dad died. I accepted this fate. I was working on it.
Then, somehow, he found me again. Only this time, it wasn't for the lesson: he wasn't there to yell at me or make me feel bad enough that I got my shit together. He came to me and he cried and he held me and he told me that he loved me.
Thus completed the circle back to what Miles once told me.
He was manipulative.
He didn't get to tell me that I was pathetic and then tell me he loved me. He taught me that. He was never supposed to stick around long enough to fall in love with me. He was just an angry kid. That's what made him so efficient.
Now he loved me, or who he thought that I was. He loved a sad, pathetic boy who couldn't handle loss or suffering. That's not who I was. He only ever knew me when I was grieving.
I didn't want him to love me as I was. I wanted him to love me ten years into the future when I had made my peace with my parents' death, and Jack's death, and Ben's disappearance and then, finally, Sully's death. I wanted him to love me when I was whole again.
But he wouldn't, because he only ever loved me when we were broken together.
I loved him, too, but in the 24 hours following Sully's death I had resolved never to tell him that because I knew he wouldn't understand. He was too young to understand that love wasn't the only thing that mattered in a relationship.
He was too young to understand that one day he would fall out of love with me, years down the road when the two of us were no longer the broken halves that formed a whole. But I did. And I couldn't put myself through another grieving process. I knew that I had to let go before it went too far.
But it's hard to make right choices when they feel so fucking wrong.
x
sorry if this is the worst john-green, i-experience-pain-more-profoundly-than-you, desperate-to-sound-deep crap you've ever read. i'm dealing with some shit. however, that is not the cause for the chapter's content. this was the plan the whole time.
sorry that it took me 9 months to post an update. i stopped writing for a while, but here we are now.
also, thanks to you guys who managed to keep your stupid potty humor & dick jokes to yourself for one chapter. you know who you are. i am usually a very sweet person but those stupid comments are insulting and a waste of my time :-)
love you guys. this book will probably end soon.