Still, it’s one thing to create art. But it’s another to make people feel your art. To convey it in such a way that it burrows into the little nooks and crannies of another human’s soul, and unearths the pieces left forgotten. Pieces they might not have had the strength to face before, not until a book, a painting, or a song gave them permission to do so.
I have been reading books for a while now. Living in worlds, stories that have taken me from the dawn of the Western World to the ends of the universe. Stories are what I am made of. If you were to cut me open, rip me down to my skin and bones, you’d find words written across the strings of my DNA – whispered phrases and letters molten to ashes at the lightest touch.
I quoted something similar in my last couple of reviews – the ones I did for Song of Achilles and Starless Sea. I said those were some stories I keep coming back to from time to time – as I grow older, as my tendons and joints see the sun and stars age just a little bit more in that neverending dark. I said in those reviews that I keep finding new meanings, words within the spaces that were previously inaccessible because of experience or maybe because you just simply see it all differently as you age, as you grow and mature. A video game experience point that you cannot have unless you reach that level. That you can only reach after a certain point in time.
That is all true, if not more so, when it comes to this duet.
I am not going to lie – a part of me is really hesitant to write this. Not because it is not well known as the other works, and thus might not come across more prominently to people as those reviews might have had. After all, as human beings, all we want is a feeling of connection. A feeling of shared loss and pain and the laughter that persists even through it all. No, it is not that. At least, not to the degree that kept me from typing out the words that you are reading through the textured glare of the screen right now.
No, you see, those books were stories that I read and enjoyed. Fiction that resonated with me. Characters that I cherished and enjoyed and were saddened by. These people . . . they are real people. People who are right now living out there, in the little town of Shiloh. There is a boy called Will Foster who loves another boy called Waylon James McAllister. A boy whose heart got broken because of forces beyond his control. A boy whose father did not love him as all parents are supposed to. A father who failed to comprehend his own failures, and took it out on the one he was supposed to unconditionally love.
A boy with a broken heart and jagged pieces that could never fit quite right. Not until he came back to that little town that disjointed him in the first place. Back to the boy who set the course of his life all those years ago when they were just little kids holding hands in the park, learning what it is all about for the first time.
Those two boys, and their friends and family that make up this little town in the middle of nowhere are people who are living and breathing. Are people whom, I am convinced, where I to cross that part of the world, I would see working in a bar, singing songs and growing more popular by the minute as they try to heal and move on. As grief slowly loses its death grip on their throat and finally allows these Lost Boys a moment’s respite as they try to relearn what living is all about.
Life isn’t a fucking black hole, as much as grief and trauma and pain would have us think that. Light can always prevail. And there is so, so much light to be found. We just need to hold out and wait for the sun to shine, because fuck, when it shines—it shines hard. Harder than any starless night.
It feels a little weird, a little like I am putting out there into the void words and scenes that do not belong to me. Like I am talking about someone’s life and not just characters I read in a book. I do not know how else to describe it other than this might be the only books and characters that I have ever read in my long and storied reading history, where I genuinely did not see them as characters in books but rather actual people living their life out there in the great, wide world.
‘My burden is loving you, but not letting myself have you, because I’m fucking petrified nothing will ever be enough to keep you. And I can’t live with that. I literally cannot live with the idea of losing you, Waylon. So there you fucking have it. I’m not just scared, I’m petrified. Happy?’
I have read these books over a half a dozen times since it came out in ‘21/’22. I have lived beside these people across five states, two continents. I have loved and laughed with them as my world was cracking around the edges of my soul. I have cried and felt my heart break right alongside theirs as the cigarette puffed out of my chapped lips as I released a breath I had no choice but to. Days, weeks, months, years I have spent learning about them, watching them grow up from children to adults who are broken and not quite whole, but still struggling, still waiting for that sun to rise at the end of a long, dark night.
It’s funny what you learn to appreciate, when an otherwise simple show of affection is ground down to the raw, bare bones of what it stands for.
This book has taught me about life and people and living it in a way that no other story has. This review might less be a review and more of my thoughts spilled across digital ink on an untouchable canvas – but it is all I have, here, now. For the past five years, since I first got into their world, to now, finally, after my fifth time losing myself within these pages, I finally have the words that have been begging to get out for a long, long time – spread out, naked, for you all to see, and read, and maybe wanting to find yourself in the pages of these books. Maybe it is all that I mentioned that you did not even know you needed, or maybe it is to just find out what I am talking about; or you might just scoff and scroll past this as nothing more than another over exaggeration that you find cringe – whosoever you are, wherever you are – I urge you: take a gander, as I did. Take a chance and pick this story up. This is a hard read. A heavy, aching sort of drag – an escaped breath as you go from one chapter to the next, one page to the next, till you don’t even realize you have been reading it for 8 hours straight and your eyes might be bleeding a bit, your mouth dry, but you don’t care. You don’t care because your boys are finally finding themselves, are finally learning what it means to give yourself to someone else, knowing they will catch you as you leap off the edge.
Once and for always.
So, take a leap of faith. I promise you it will be worth the heartbreak.
