26
In the still misery of that night three days after it happened, the idea came to me: a book. Write a book. A real book, not just a diary. Summer’s book. The one I’d promised her. So what if Eighty Eight was gone – I’d start all over again. I had to. I would take the thoughts clawing out of me and turn them into something real. I would expand my diary for Summer, which I still had, and elaborate on it until it was a full book, a real book, a complete document of our summer together, through my eyes. I’d be fulfilling my promise to her and hopefully immortalizing her in one fell swoop.
Part of me thought I was crazy to even try. I could barely walk to the bathroom without collapsing to cry a new surface – how in the hell did I think I was going to write an entire book? But I fought on. Ernest Hemingway said to write one true thing and start from there, and so that’s what I did. I took out my laptop and wrote the following sentence: I love Summer Johnson. Because I did. And I do. And that fact will rule my entire existence.
My blood warmed as I sank into writer mode. Yes, this was going to be something, alright. I didn’t know what yet, but something. A Summer level of something. I would make absolutely sure of it. I would spin this tragedy into gold or die trying. I owed her that much. She had fought this world like hell, and so what if she’d made all the right moves and still lost? It was my turn to head into battle.
They say that if a writer falls in love with you, you can never die. Summer’s name would never be carved in stone in monuments or tributes, but she had still carved her name onto my soul, and she deserved the same to be done to her legacy – but in a much larger sense. And so, with the windswept notion that I was hurtling toward destiny, I held my hands over my keyboard and prepared to etch my vanished girlfriend onto the storm-scraped surface of history – one keystroke at a time.
~
Hundreds, sometimes thousands of words an hour flowed out of me, and in remarkably good form, too. I hadn’t written like that in years, actually – maybe ever. I felt a sense of purpose sink down into my every pore as I wrote every detail of her, every detail of me, every detail of us; every flaw every facet every moment until she felt almost real again. Because she was real, she was broken and she was gorgeous.
As I wrote I soon discovered that as an artist, she was the ultimate muse: there was so much to work with, so many peaks and valleys to explore. She wasn’t some one-dimensional cardboard cutout character of a human; she had flaws and quirks and weird little habits that drove me nuts sometimes. She could be cynical to the point of being jaded, she never met a curse word she didn’t like, and no matter how close we got, there was still this side of her that felt unknowable, unreachable, like when you peered into a dark lake and saw its muddy bottoms descend into murky black nothingness. I always got the sense that there was much I would never know about Summer, and I was right. Basically, she was touched by fire – lightning in a bottle. She seemed to know something the world didn’t, and everything from her thoughts to her eyes seemed to burn with that secret. Her spitfire radiance warmed me up for the first time in my life, and soon I became addicted to that heat.
I should’ve known she burned too brightly for my broken world. All I knew for sure was that I would’ve done anything to sit by her fire again for just one more hour. But in the meantime, the least I could do for her was write.
Soon I found that it wasn’t the bad memories of her that pulled me down, the fights or the tears – it was the good times that stuck out at me. It was every moment I’d touched her skin and saw my future; every time she laughed that hall-of-fame laugh in the car with me; every night she’d called my name in the heat of the July air. I was haunted by happiness, because every glimpse of her glory was just a reminder of what I’d lost; a peek of the castle in the sky that never was; an echo of the love I’d never feel again. A passing chill from the ghost of what could’ve been.
I wrote on and on, but like vomit, the words burned on the way out, and when the pain became too much I grabbed my laptop for a break. I don’t know why, and I knew Summer would probably never see it, but suddenly I got the need to message her. I knew she didn’t believe in heaven with a capital H and all that, but I missed the fuck out of her, and this seemed as direct a line of communication to her as any. The prospect of calling her voicemail absolutely terrified me for some reason, and reading her texts – the digital remains of her life – was out of the question. The set of letters and emojis sitting in my messaging folder had outlived my girlfriend, and that was something I could not deal with. So I figured Facebook would be the next best thing.
After I reactivated my account, the website asked for my relationship status. Without thinking, I entered “In A Relationship with Summer Johnson,” because I was, and always would be.
“Thanks,” my screen said. “This information will be displayed once Summer Johnson logs in and approves your relationship request.”
Needless to say, Summer would never log in and approve my request.
I wiped my nose and clicked on her profile. Holding my hand over her photo because I still couldn’t bring myself to look at it, I opened up the messaging feature and wrote this:
I’m still in love with you. Come back
I sniffled and sent the message. And call me a masochist, but after that I scrolled down her page to see what people were saying about her – and the Facebook crowd was saying a lot, surprise of the century. Her closest friends had been quiet, of course, as they knew Summer was mortified by public displays of emotion or affection, but that had not stopped every random acquaintance and classmate and former coworker from crawling out of the woodwork to moan and wail and air-dry all their grievances online.
I bit my lip and scanned the dozens of comments and posts she’d been tagged in, and the first unexpectedly broke my heart. It was from some girl who’d gotten married right after the surgery, and instead of doing a bouquet toss, she’d thrown the flowers into the lake behind her wedding venue. She’d posted a picture of white petals floating on the still surface of a dark pond, along with this caption:
This is for you, Summer, wherever you are. We just wanted you to catch it for some reason. Love and miss you. Wish I could walk through that door at work and see that million dollar smile one more time.
–Love, Brianna from work.
I “liked” the photo with tears in my eyes and scrolled down, but the posts just got more and more annoying and attention-seeking. In fact, most of the kids had mentioned their own names, and how they were coping, more frequently than they’d mentioned Summer. The way people in my generation ran to their phones to post about the dead had always perplexed me, but in this case it was infuriating. Why were we such whores for attention? These were probably some the same girls who had made Summer feel so inferior with their showoff wedding posts, she’d downloaded the Spark app to keep up with them. What was wrong with us?
I put on a Saviour song and thought about it as I sank back into writing mode. As children we were obsessively rewarded and praised and doted upon – you mean you finished second-to-last in the race in P.E. class? Here’s a golden star. You’re a star! You’re all stars! And oh, shit, now there are towers falling from the sky and white powder is being sent to news networks? Your world is falling apart, so take ten more golden stars!
So as we grew up into a broken world that had no place for the monsters it had created, we’d transferred this deep-seeded lust for kudos and acknowledgment online and chased our broken American dreams onto social media, broadcasting our grotesque need for validation through the ever-expanding network of Ethernet cables quickly unfurling across the land and encircling the Earth like prison bars. We were a billion little celebrities – a billion little Brangelinas in our own minds – smiling for the selfies and sending them out for a brave new world to gawk at. We had stars on our report cards and stars in our eyes and we were stars in our own minds. We were all lost and searching and drowning out the silence and the pain with the noise, because like Saviour had said, the truth of our burned-out America meant nothing as long as the lie was pretty enough. We were the new American nightmare, so snap some photos of our bulbous wedding cakes – we’d arrived, validate us with your love and your likes.
But I wanted the cycle to end. I wanted people like Summer to stop being immortalized without her consent on a fucking Facebook wall; I wanted girls like her to stop being made to feel inferior because of a few people begging for some stupid marriage spotlight. And in a way, Summer was her generation: a girl coming into the light of love; a generation coming into the light of the Internet. How could I prove once and for all that true love lived in the darkness; that human dignity really existed in the shadows?
Soon I got bored with writing and went back to Facebook, as any Millennial would, and within minutes I found the worst post of all, from some redhead I’d literally never even heard of before:
This still doesn’t even seem real! Only the good die young. RIP, Summer. Cancer is such a monster. Please pray for me, y’all, I’m not taking this very well. But at least her death is teaching us so much. Miss ya, girlie, but I am so comforted to know that you will remain in our hearts forever, until…
I couldn’t read anymore. No, I thought with a frown that suddenly twisted up from the bottom of me. No. No no no no no. No. This was a level of narcissism I could not tolerate. Summer had lost her fucking LIFE, and THIS girl wanted prayers?
Okay, hear me out on this one: after being raised around my mother, I’d formed this theory that all healthy people secretly held the outrageously patronizing and megalomaniacal belief that all sick/flawed/challenged people were put on this planet to Teach Them Lessons and Be Shining Examples Of Triumph In The Face of Doom. All this Facebook nonsense was just corroborating that hypothesis. Like, every time a sick person died, healthy people went around saying things like “her life was not in vain, since it taught us all so much about ourselves” and “aren’t you thankful for what you learned from her death?”
No. Summer Johnson was not an experiment in humanity, and she did not die to teach me some corny lesson about Life and Love and Loss and Angels Finding Their Wings. She died because she died. She was a person who had thoughts and dreams and fears and fetishes and failures and glories just like anyone else, and she also happened to get sick and die. Sick people were not put on this Earth for any more or less of a reason than healthy people were, and to imply anything else was both infuriating and just plain stupid. She was not a dancing monkey whose sole purpose was to teach me shit, and I really wished people would get that, but I didn’t know how to tell them without sounding like a dick.
And the saying “only the good die young” was the ultimate disservice to her, too, because it made her no better than any other young person who bit the dust. Like, this one kid I knew who accidentally shot himself while showing off his new gun to his friends at a party? It sucks that he died, but he was a total asshole. He would taunt freshman in the halls and call people names and shout four letter words at people for daring to make eye contact with him, and just because he died at nineteen didn’t mean he had anything to do with Summer. She was better than him. A lot of good people died young, that was true, and it sucked. But a lot of idiots died young, too – it was just that no one was allowed to mention it, because that would be cruel, right? Nobody wanted to be the one shit-talking a dead kid, so they washed everyone in the same angelic tones and called it a day. They called death the great equalizer, and it was – because in the rearview mirror, everyone was a hero.
But Summer really was a hero. In every sense, she was mine, at least. I wanted everyone in the world to know it, but I didn’t know how to talk about her in a way that wouldn’t embarrass her or seem condescending. It all went back to her modesty: she deserved recognition, but shunned attention. I knew I had to do something to let the world know how golden she was, and I knew I wanted to try to put a period on the end of the abbreviated, unresolved sentence that was her life. I thought that maybe the book could do that, but I still wasn’t sure.
As I reached up to close my laptop, the page refreshed and two new posts popped up on her wall. Amanda was praying for Jesus to meet his new angel with open arms, Bekah was hoping that we would all remember the lessons of Summer’s death forever, and I was headed to my fridge for another beer.
~
The next day I was writing like a madman while listening to a Saviour track, Say Anything:
Out of the silence, it rises up
That voice, reminding me that this life will never be enough
So I grab my phone and stare at the stars
But these distractions, they never get me very far
So say anything, kid, take me anywhere
Just get these monsters outta my hair
And say anything, just take me anywhere
I’m slowly gettin’ killed by all this dead air
If I was in those hills of Beverly, it wouldn’t be like this
Fame, sex, white lines, glamorous misery, give me all of it
Stuck in a life I never planned for, with problems I don’t even care about enough to fix
This set of bones I’ve been given, I could do without – I just wasn’t born for this
(So say anything)
(Take me anywhere)
That’s when I got a call from Aunt Susan. It seemed that Shelly, in a fit of angry grief, had torn apart Summer’s room looking for a goodbye note, a diary, some kind of last words to give her some sense of closure, but had found nothing of the sort. (It did strike me as odd that someone so analytical and obsessed with little details as Summer would not have left something behind, but I tried not to dwell on it.) Shelly did, however, find Summer’s secret chest, that corner of every human’s bedroom where they hide from the world the things that revealed their most quietly desperate desires. Susan wanted me to know that in the chest was a specials menu from Joe’s Crab Shack dated March 25th.
I said thank you as everything in me broke apart again, and then I asked if she could tell me anything else about the stash. The only other thing of substance she’d found was a photo ripped from an Intresia pamphlet that had said I DON’T CARE ABOUT SOCIETY’S APPROVAL, BUT I WILL GET ITS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, which I found very interesting. Then I asked if there was anything else in the chest, anything at all that she remembered seeing, no matter how insignificant.
The only other thing Susan remembered noticing before ushering Shelly out of the room and into a hot bath was a stack of wedding magazines.