—I WISH I HAD A TIME MACHINE, I’D CHANGE EVERYTHING

 

 

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC  /  Kevin Wilson 

 

 

“It doesn’t hurt,” he told me, and I believed him.

 

So I let him kiss me. And even then, in that very moment, I knew that this was important. I knew that I would trace my whole life back to this very moment. I knew it would probably fuck me up. And that was fine.

 

It felt like alchemy, like the world was finally big enough for the things we cared about.

 

--“Do you love me?” he asked.

--“I do,” I said without hesitation, and it was nice to answer a question that didn’t require constant adjustment to my brain. “I do, and you know I do.”

 

We’d created meaning where there was none, but, I don’t know, isn’t that art? Or at least I think it’s the kind of art that I like, where the obsession of one person envelops other people, transforms them.

 

--“Is this the edge?” Zeke asked me.

--“I think that, maybe, everywhere we are is the edge.”

 

At that moment, I could feel something opening up in me and I realized how hard it was to walk through the day when you had an obsession and you couldn’t say a word about it.

 

That was the beauty of obsession, I realized. It never waned. Real obsession, if you did it right, was the same intensity every single time, a kind of electrocution that kept your heart beating.

 

I think maybe it’s necessary to feel like you’re not quite settled.

 

It made me feel, for the first time, that maybe it was dumb to be embarrassed about weird things if you were really good at them.

 

I thought it would be good to feel slightly sick as everything changed.

 

“It’s unnatural for two brothers to not, at some point, beat the absolute shit out of each other over some ridiculous slight, don’t you think?”

 

I could tell that maybe I’d tried too hard to write about my own life, had made it too explicitly autobiographical, and it had gotten messed up in the execution. 

 

I’d pray that he couldn’t smell me, what was underneath all that perfume, because I knew it would smell so desperate, so lonely.

 

I think maybe art is supposed to make your family uncomfortable.

 

There was this little voice inside my head and it was telling me what to write down.

 

“Maybe we should make art,” he said, just like that, like art was cookies or microwave popcorn. Like if anything was going to keep us from having sex, from doing something we’d regret, it would be art.

 

I don’t think either one of us understood how hard it was to create something good.

 

He tasted like celery, like rabbit food, every single time, and I loved it. I was afraid to ask him what I tasted like.

 

I listened as hard as I could, like if I tried hard enough, I would truly understand.

 

I wondered how it was possible for every single thing you said to sound so dumb, so weightless.

 

And you always chose the person who didn’t fuck everything up. You chose the person who was stuck with you.

 

Was this how loved worked? You shared something personal, stood close to each other?

 

We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe you were destined to make beautiful things.

 

If something happened to me, it would happen to him.

 

I was already trying to figure out how to get lost again, to stay lost.

 

Right at this moment, as everything was changing, it was like my life didn’t know it yet.

 

I wanted to see violence done in the name of fun.

 

“Don’t touch people who don’t want to be touched.”

 

Who touches a girl’s elbow and then gets shy?

 

My mom let me have the house to myself, and at first I was happy for the silence, but soon it began to feel oppressive, like the walls knew I was the only person there and could shrink down to hold me in place.

 

It’s always better to be bored with someone else.

 

And this intrigued me, that his story required editing.

 

He seemed happy, and I was overjoyed, sincerely, to know this. I hadn’t ruined him. He hadn’t ruined me. We’d stayed alive in this world.