I
Sometimes, Yadav writes the truth.
Yadav is thirteen when he learns not everything is worth a story. Some footsteps taken are just footsteps taken—not the beginning of a journey of a thousand steps. A story is something he needs to earn, not something he deserves just for being alive.
He is foolish before thirteen. He writes about too much:
- the things he loves
- the things he hates
- the stain on his shoe from the time he spilled paint over it
- the scratches carved into his desk by every student that sat at it
- the way mud tracks into the classroom every day after their lunch break
- how they all dislike it but can’t be bothered to clean it up
- how they quietly scrape the mud off their shoes against the legs of their desks, each of them hoping no one sees them do it
Because, as a child, Yadav sees things and thinks that means they are worth being heard. “This is very nice, Yadav,” his teacher says, frowning at his paper as he returns it.
“Very observant, good details. But your story doesn’t go anywhere.”
Yadav frowns. “Does it need to?”
His teacher looks amused, the way he does when one of his students says something particularly childish.
“Of course it does. It’s not a story if nothing happens in it.” He pats Yadav on the head and walks off to another student, another paper, another thirteen-year life to summarize as nothing happened.
Yadav is left with the words he’d written with such care about things that only really matter to him. He is thirteen when he realizes that a story isn’t for you.
. . .
At fifteen, he hears the myth of Narcissus.
It’s told to him as something ridiculous. It’s said in passing as he sits with his friends on the curb. They’re talking about the boy in their class who is taller than them, is more handsome than them, and gets perfect grades without trying.
“He’d probably kiss his own face in the mirror,” one of the kids says, and someone else agrees. The way they spit the words—it sounds like a crime. It sounds like the most humiliating thing a person could do.
Yadav is fifteen, still a foolish child, so he makes the mistake of asking, “Is that so bad?”
There’s an awful silence.
“Would you kiss your face in the mirror?” the boy sitting beside him asks, appalled. Yadav wouldn’t. He could never love himself enough for that. But no disgust curls into his heart at the thought of someone who could. It only makes him think it must be lovely to care about yourself enough to do that.
His silence is uninteresting, so the kid moves on.
“Haven’t you heard about Narcissus?” he asks. “He loved himself so much he tried to hug his reflection in a lake. And then he drowned. Like an idiot.”
“He’d never seen his own face before?” someone else asks.
“I bet he did. But kissing a mirror couldn't drown him, I guess.”
The boy next to Yadav shakes his head. “He'd never seen himself,” he says. “And once he did, he fell in love.”
“Is that gay?” someone else wonders.
They laugh, but Yadav only wonders what must it have felt like to see himself. To see yourself and then think this was a person worthy of love?
The story of Narcissus seems to say: Don’t love yourself too much. But what is too much for someone who has never loved himself at all?
. . .
There are things he learns as he grows up:
- how there are words he can write but can never say
- how a story can be told, and then it can end without repercussions or the fear of a life after it
- how the words he says out loud must not be so careless because real life never ends conveniently
He notices this as he grows up and sees the words his friends write grow darker and darker.
They write of death, pointlessness, and a world ending in a few years. They write of knives and family and begging a mother for forgiveness. They write of monsters so terrible that they have no physical form, storms that never end, and love so fierce it destroys the Earth.
The thing is, they all still write of themselves. The words they write get darker and darker, but aloud, all they say is,
“Do you want to get another cup of coffee?”
“Trigonometry is giving me hell.”
“—and then we got kicked out of the store, which was so unfair because it wasn’t even my fault.”
The words they speak are lighthearted, casual, careful. Their words are tailored by the dull years they’ve lived, never to give anything away.
The trick to getting by, Yadav learns, is to be as little of a person as possible: to smile, cry, say hello and goodbye, but to never let yourself be the protagonist.
Bury anything of yourself that could resemble a story, and you’ll be saved a life after the ending. The real world doesn’t have the mercy of an epilogue.
. . .
Stories, he finds out, are a way to hide. A way to ask to be loved without ever having to be real. A way to be yourself without ever having to be you.
Stories are the lies they tie around themselves to avoid the curse that destroyed Narcissus.
Yadav is twenty-three, burned out, unemployed, with a four-year degree that makes him no different from the millions of other people who have it—and it isn’t okay for him to walk into traffic on a fairly good day and say, “It’s because I was sad.”
At twenty-three, burned out and just like everyone else, Yadav needs to get brave and live. To stop being foolish. To learn that this is just how it is in the real world, with no ending to look forward to, no epilogue to tie things up. Just one foot after another on a path that never goes anywhere. Twenty-three years of life to summarize as nothing happened.
Yadav can’t say, “I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to be this sad.”
So instead, he says, “Do you want to get another cup of coffee?” and he writes instead.
He writes about a man who is twenty-three, burned out, unemployed, with a four-year degree that he’s doing nothing with. He writes about him as someone who isn’t himself. And just like that, he is easier to care for. A kiss in the mirror, but with his eyes tightly shut. It’s not quite love. Perhaps it will never be. But it’s a quiet hope of I wish your story was something worth hearing. Maybe that’s as close to love as anything gets.
. . .
He never does learn to love Yadav, but he learns to love so many others.
He doesn’t love the Yadav who sat in silence on the sidewalk because he couldn’t speak his mind, but he learns to love the boy in a novel he reads who grew up just as afraid, who makes the same mistakes, who lives just as terribly in the quiet.
He doesn’t love the Yadav who hasn’t called his mother in weeks and has a panic attack every time he tries to do it, but he loves the woman in the movie he watched last night, who stares at her phone for too long, then puts it aside, and can’t bring herself to get out of bed.
He doesn’t learn to love Yadav, but he learns to love the pieces of him hidden in the words written by other people who are hiding just as much. People who have sawed away at these chunks of their hearts and buried them in their art in hopes that no one can ever tie it back to them, in hopes that no one will ever think of them as having wanted to hold their reflection closer.
Yadav thinks about Narcissus often. He wonders what the man had seen in the water to have not been able to look away—what he must have seen himself as all those days before, for that one moment of clarity to have meant as much as it did.
Had it been the same feeling Yadav gets when he finds himself hidden in someone else’s words?
The feeling of—oh. I’m real.
This is real.
This is worth a story.
This isn’t something I’m alone in.
Because Yadav still can not look at his own reflection. But instead, perhaps, he can look at a monster.
Instead, perhaps, he can pretend that a monster deserves love.
. . .
Sometimes, he writes the truth:
- how his name is Yadav, he’s now twenty-four, and he’s so scared of everything, all of the time
- how he has so much to say and no one to say it to
- how the words claw at his throat in their desperation to come out, but the mirror cracks if he ever tries to care for it
- how he wishes so much that he had the strength to call his mother
Words that burn as he puts them down, words that he can never bear to look at again:
- Mom, I don’t know what to do.
- I wish I could tell you who I am and know that you would still love me.
- I wish I could live the rest of my life if you didn’t.
- I don’t know how to bury myself in words that I need to pretend aren’t mine.
- I don’t know how to pretend that none of these stories I read hold the truth.
Yadav strikes them all out.
Over and over.
He strikes it until the I that bleeds through the pages is indecipherable, and no one can tell it had ever been there at all.
Vihaan is thirteen when he realizes that not everything is worth a story he writes instead. Because no one wants to hear the story of Yadav. It’s too wrong. Too dangerous.
Vihaan is thirteen when he learns not everything is worth a story. Some footsteps taken are just footsteps taken—not the beginning of a journey of a thousand steps.
A story is something he needs to earn, not something he deserves just for being alive. He is foolish before thirteen. He writes about too much—
. . .