THIS IS NOT A CANCER BOOK
So: I think I met someone yesterday.
I can still see her. I can still see us there at Joe’s Crab Shack, where we met. I can still taste the salt in the air. It’s like I never left, actually. And now I just want to get to know everything about her.
Instantly, I knew she was different. She was cute and funny and didn’t seem like the other girls from my town. There was just something so…direct about her, about the way she looked at me. She wasn’t a typical “dating app girl,” with the way they act like they’ll do anything and act any way they can to make you like them. It was usually the ultimate parlor game: who do you want me to be tonight? But the way her hazel eyes – which were both warm and hypnotizing – looked at me just screamed I see you. I know you. Hi.
The artist’s eye is drawn to the contradiction, the thing that does not make sense, and this question mark of a girl sucked me in like the summer wind. This cool beachy girl with the heartbroken eyes, the reserved body language…when I saw her, words started pouring out of my brain, right then and there. I was addicted to it, to this strange reaction, immediately.
Needless to say, Internet Cooper completely flew out the window. For a moment I was speechless, like how you see in the movies, and I wanted to be Cooper – but not the fake version of him. The real one. The one that liked to talk about death and poetry and the nerdy shit I read about in National Geographic and The Economist.
I don’t remember what we talked about, exactly – I was too busy studying her like the psycho I am. Before long she averted her beautiful honey eyes and sort of pulled away from me, and I fell apart for her. It is amazing how stupid you can be when you have beauty to look at.
As I sat there, there was so much I didn’t say. (Which, knowing me, is probably a good thing.) The pervert in me wanted to ask her what she tasted like. What she would feel like while I was inside her. But I didn’t. To get myself the hell out of there to a place that wasn’t so public, I suggested we leave. And so we walked, and I just sort of watched her. And soon I realized there was something a bit off about her, a bit different. She had the type of eyes that looked utterly alone in a crowd, but I didn’t believe life had made her this way. She had chosen this isolation. She was too elegant for this wrecked-up mess of a world. She was above it. She had to be. There was no other option I could see.
I stalked the shit out of her on social media when I got home. She reminded me of my grandmother, the most elegant woman I ever knew. She made me…feel. Like I hadn’t in ages. Before I went to sleep I looked out of my bedroom window and actually peered past the rooftops and stared at the waves, felt the breeze, listened for the seagulls. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel so lost anymore.
When I walked outside to walk my dog the next morning, Summer’s eyes were in the bushes. Her smile was in the sky. Her heart was in my chest. And as I hit the pavement I somehow knew for sure that this was going to do one of two things: hurt, or remake me.
THREE DAYS LATER
Something is happening. I don’t know what, but it is something. We’ve hung out a few more times, and I just can’t shake her from my mind. I don’t know what to do, but I’m always thinking of her. It’s like she scrambled my motherboard, and I have been left senseless in the aftermath. Wherever I go, whatever I do, I think of her eyes. And her smell. And her hair. And her boobs. Definitely the boobs. It’s like she was airbrushed into reality. I try to go about my life, but all I think about is what she’s doing, whether she’s thinking of me, whether her mother knows how lucky she is to be around her all day.
But she doesn’t seem to know how great she is, so I tried to change that. The other night I took her to my special place, and we jumped off the pier. Her face glowed green in the night. And she was so beautiful.
“Look down,” I whispered, and so she looked down and gasped. “It’s phosphorescent plankton,” I said as she stared at her glow-in-the-dark skin. This was what I’d always wanted: to let someone in on my secret, nerdy world. I remember planning out a whole picnic for this girl Leigh in my favorite patch of woods across the street in St. Augustine when I was a kid, just so we could look at my favorite kinds of trees and flowers. I also remember her turning me down immediately. But this was a brave new world, a brave new town, a brave new Cooper.
I watched her as she studied her glowing skin. “My friends and I learned about this the first time we broke into the pier after dark and drunkenly jumped off,” I said. “We looked down and noticed that we’d lit up like fireworks. It was crazy, and we’ve been doing pier jumps every year since then. But anyway, now you can see what I see. You were wrong, Summer: you do glow.”
ONE DAY LATER
My skull has cracked open, and words are flying out in screaming color. That’s right: I’m pretentiously trying to say that I’m writing again. I know it seems quick, and I might look crazy, but come on: it’s my job to write happily ever after. And I have started writing ours. Summer was like a spotlight that somehow opened something within me, and things are spilling out. I’m writing nothing major – just sort of daydreamily doodling on my notepad and in my phone, but still, it’s not nothing. She’s making things rise back to the surface, and my writing has never been like this. She has broken down the fourth wall, pierced whatever shell was holding me in from experiencing the full and true world around me, and now I can see. Not perfectly, but better. I’ll never show her any of this besides this short story I wrote a while ago, but still: this is big. She has dusted me off, given me access to myself, and I want to kiss her every second to thank her.
I can’t tell her about all this, of course, about how she’s my muse. She’ll think it’s creepy. She probably already thinks I’m enough of a stalker, what with showing up at her house to pick her up totally unannounced, and all that. I’ve got to remind myself to cool it and pump the brakes every once in a while. But I can’t. She’s making me too hot.
It’s like she’s made me go crazy. Whoever I am, this isn’t me. I am constantly on the edge of losing control and touching the other side, revealing too much of my heart, my soul, my desires, my dreams, my nightmares. She’s drenched me in vivid reds, deep blues, vibrant yellows, and I am soaking in the color. We talked about the writing thing yesterday, actually. I spat out that I was a writer, but then I wanted to take it back just as quickly. But for whatever reason, she was intrigued.
“But the thing is,” I said, backtracking, “I’m not even sure if I want to be a writer. Don’t you think it’s the douchiest title ever? Like, just the word ‘writer’ has a connotation that makes me sound like some hipster asshole who sits in coffee shops pondering the meaning of life and bragging about some stupid book I’m working on. I am the opposite of that. Most of my friends don’t even know I write, because I never talk about it.”
“I don’t think it’s douchy,” she said. “I think it’s cool.”
“You do?”
This weird, far-off look came over her. “In 1996,” she said, “my dad brought me to the Atlanta Olympics. That’s the probably the only thing he brought me to, but I digress. Anyway, we sat in this huge arena and watched some swimming and running and stuff, and as you sat there you just got this…this weird feeling, this roaring in your ears, like you were watching people do what they were born to do. They were living out their purposes right there in front of you. It was so exciting, it made your bones shake. And maybe…I don’t know, maybe you were born to do this. You’re obviously passionate about it. Maybe I want to sit and watch you write one day and see if my bones shake.”
Chills covered my face. Nobody besides my mom had ever talked to me like this, encouraged me like this. If I blew out all the air in my lungs, I could part the goddamn sea. So I told a joke to bring things back to a lighter place. “Did you just ask me to make your bones shake on one of our first dates?”
“Haha,” she said, a quick little burst of a word. “Well, whatever, it was cool. And then I got weak and fell down the steps to the bleachers, but that’s a different story.”
I gave her a funny look. “Why?”
She blinked and then recovered quickly. “Nothing. I’m just a klutz.”
I biked home feeling good, strong, fortified. All I thought of was her. And as I slipped into sleep that night, I took out my phone and tapped out my first good poem in months:
I run to what scares me
I dream for what is beyond my reach
you are luminous, magnificent, miles out of my league
girl, I can’t wait for you to make me bleed