He must have taken that as a yes because he showed up at my house a few days later with Preston in tow. He walked straight into my living room like he’d received a formal invite (plot twist: he didn’t), plopping down on the couch and setting Preston’s car seat on the floor beside him.
“This is the first time I’ve sat on your couch,” he said, hitting the cushion. “Better not tell your mother the heathen’s been here. She’ll burn it.”
My shoulder brushed his as I sat beside him. It was the first time I’d touched him in nearly a month. It was the first time being next to him, huddled close, didn’t feel any more wrong than it felt right.
“Doubtful,” I said, watching Preston’s little blanket move up and down as he breathed. He really was Snake’s Mini Me, cute enough to make even a baby hater like me soften just a little. “She’s on this new kick where she’s all understanding and kind. It’s disgusting.”
“I don’t believe you. That doesn’t sound like the Karen we know and barely put up with.”
“I guess you’re not the only one who’s allowed to change.”
“You think I’ve changed?”
“I think we both have.”
He glanced at his hands. “I don’t feel the way I used to. I don’t know why. I’m not sure if it’s Preston, or finally being in a good place with Carla, but I haven’t eaten a Twizzler in three weeks. Three weeks. I’ve never done that before.”
“So you think you’re not depressed anymore because you cut licorice from your diet?”
“No,” he said. “I think I’ve lost the urge to need. And I think I’ve already been as depressed as I’ll ever be.”
I thought about my dad and how empty the world seemed when I tried to imagine it without him. How everything reminded me of despair—?real, hollowing, pit-in-your-stomach despair. It was nothing more than fearing my own darkness.
“You were afraid,” I said, sinking closer to him. He smelled like baby powder and not like strawberry. “Without me, there was nothing to distract you from the pain.”
He placed his hand in mine, and I slid my fingers through his. We sat like that for only a fraction of an instant, but an instant was enough. I didn’t dread the temporariness of us.
“When you stopped talking to me, I was in the worst place I’d ever been in. I couldn’t eat or get out of bed or do anything, really. It was horrible. I thought I wouldn’t survive it. But seeing you at the hospital changed something. I realized it wasn’t your job to make me better. Only I could do that. And I can. I can survive without you. I can survive without needing you to fix me. And maybe I’ll never be completely okay, but I know I’ll never be completely broken, either. And that’s life, I guess. Survival. That’s the tightrope.” He ran his thumb along my wrist.
“It gets better,” I said. I’d never believed it more than I did then.
He glanced at his sleeping baby, his face lighting up. “Life is a hell of a lot more generous than I was giving it credit for.”
Our eyes met, we both smiled, and inevitably it happened. I don’t know if it was his will or my own, but our lips fell together, and his hand clutched my neck, and we were a tangled mess of recklessness and hurt and depression and existence. It didn’t matter if I loved him. It didn’t matter if I didn’t. It mattered that I could feel him, feel everything, and not need to hate it.
He and I would never last. Even the happiness of now couldn’t delude us into believing that. But as long as there was a now, there was no use in worrying about a later.
“I have something you need to see,” he whispered against my lips.
I glanced from him to Preston. “Now is not the time.”
“Reggie Mason, what a dirty mind you have. That is not the something I’m talking about.” He grabbed my hand and held Preston’s car seat with the other, dragging us both up the stairs. Once we reached the top, he nodded down the hallway. “Point me to your room, will you?”
I led him into my bedroom, pausing to let him laugh at the bareness of it. The white bed, the empty walls, the uncluttered desk. Not all of us could be grunge band poster enthusiasts (see: emo narcissistic dicks).
“It’s . . . yellow,” he tried to say through the laughter. “Like, the happiest color in the rainbow.”
“Karen’s tried every trick in the book.” I sat down on the bed, moving toward the wall to make room.
He unstrapped Preston from his car seat and cradled the baby’s head to his chest, leaning back against the headboard. Using his free hand, he reached into his back pocket and retrieved a DVD case with a white label reading THE SHEER USELESSNESS OF OUR CONDITION. I finally knew what this little setup was. A makeshift movie premiere.
He noticed the twitch in my mouth as I tried desperately not to smile, and his smirk grew to full width. “And without further ado,” he announced, waving the disc at me, “I pre-sent to you The Sheer Uselessness of Our Condition. Directed by the brilliant Snake Eliot. Starring that girl with resting bitch face, Reggie Mason, and Carla Banks, the mother of my awesome child—?who would kill me if she knew I didn’t show it to her first.”
I balled up my fist to punch him, but released it when I realized punching a dude who was holding a baby was probably illegal in Ohio.
I stuck the movie in and let it play. It was everything I didn’t know I wanted it to be, and everything I hadn’t realized we were until that very instant. Shots of sun rays and lightning and dumpsters and collapsing buildings and bottles of pills. Sped-up shots of Carla holding all her sonograms, of her crying and smiling and talking about all the possible good things that were to come. Of me being miserable and cynical and brutally aware of it all. Of me in the Hawkesbury parking lot theorizing that nothing we do matters, that nothing makes a difference. Voice-overs of Maks and Margaret, all the same as from the sneak peek I’d watched that night in Snake’s room. Sad piano pieces, and The Onslaught soundtrack lady, and the Renegade Dystopia. Preston lying in his hospital bed blinking wide-eyed at the camera. Carla laughing. Snake and his moms holding Preston, kissing his forehead. Sunshine. Warm colors. Spring spilling into summer.
Nothing gelled perfectly. It was choppy and rough, and didn’t fit together no matter how stunning the score, or how seamlessly edited the footage. But it was as real as the people who lived it all. It was our lives on catastrophic display. It was our uselessness. And it really, really mattered.