The last time I ever saw Solomon in the flesh was a month after I posted my photo project online.
I found him down by the river. For a week I’d been looking for him, in a haphazard and unstructured kind of way. Stopping by the train tracks or looking under the Rip Van Winkle Bridge whenever I could. I’d been too busy to mount a proper search—my application to the California Institute of the Arts; fielding anger and appreciation from the football players, some of whom were loving and some of whom were hating the fact that tons of people online had seen and commented on their faces.
Solomon sat on the rocks, his guitar on his lap. Winter was well on its way by then. He wore a lot of layers.
“Hey, mister,” I said.
“Ash,” he said. He smiled, but he looked sad.
I hugged him, and he pressed his face into my neck. “You doing okay?”
He shrugged. So, no.
I’d meant to tell him the latest about Mr. Barrett. That my father had succeeded in convening a meeting of the school board, to talk about getting him dismissed. That he’d already spoken with two people on the board, friends of his, and convinced them of the truth of what he was saying. So he wasn’t going in there alone. So something might happen.
But also, nothing might happen. Mr. Barrett had a lot of friends. He could brush it off, deny the allegations, bring a suit against my father for slander. We could be the ones whose lives got ruined.
I didn’t say any of that. I sat down on the rocks beside him and grabbed his arm in both hands and squeezed.
“Thanks, Ash. Some days are better than others.”
“You’re still seeing the therapist they assigned over at CPS?”
“Yeah. She’s nice. I don’t think she really gets me, but she doesn’t put up with any of my bullshit and I appreciate that.”
“That’s amazing.”
We were in touch, sometimes. Messages, voice mails. Whenever his phone was on and charged, which wasn’t often. I knew he was trying his hardest to get help. Some days he was more successful than others.
Solomon looked at his mittened hands. “I just . . . will I always feel like this?”
“No,” I said. “You absolutely won’t.”
“Lots of survivors of sexual assault spend their whole lives dealing with the aftermath.”
“That doesn’t mean you’ll always be . . . whatever you’re feeling now.”
Solomon shrugged.
“Look at you and Sheffield. Mr. Barrett hurt you both, but look how differently you responded to it. He started hurting others. You didn’t. And he was able to choose to stop. We are not our trauma. We are not our brain chemistry. That’s part of who we are, but we’re so much more than that.”
Six weeks later Solomon turned eighteen, and then he left town. I could see it, then, even though it hadn’t happened yet. Who knows how. A vision of the future; a gift from the Ash on the other side. He would leave. Forever.
“I mean, look at Helen Keller,” I said, feeling like my throat was starting to close up. “Everyone just assumed that with all her challenges, she’d never do anything with her life. Even the people who loved her just wanted to keep her in the house like a shameful secret. But she got the help she needed, to figure out how to live and thrive with her disabilities.”
“Don’t you use Helen Keller against me,” he said, his face opening up into a big beautiful grin.
“I read that book you gave me,” I said. “Her autobiography.”
“Amazing, right?”
“So amazing.” Tears sprang to my eyes, as much from the memory of Helen’s story as from the realization that was settling into my stomach. That I was losing my best friend in the world. “She died knowing she hadn’t accomplished everything she wanted to accomplish, making all the changes she wanted to make in the world. But she died happy, because she knew she did everything in her power to make those things happen.”
For a while I would get messages from him, on social media platforms. For a while he would send postcards—from Montana, from Saskatchewan.
Then he wouldn’t.
Sitting there, watching the sun slip away, I could feel the loss of him even though he wasn’t yet lost. I couldn’t control what I saw. I got the outline, but not the details. Did he become a hugely successful rock star? Did he find a boy he loved, who loved him back, and then build an incredible life together? Solomon strummed a chord, which came out muffled with his mittens on.
I’d been reading a lot, about people with severe mental illnesses. Their memoirs, their essays. Books and articles by the people who loved them. I knew what weird, twisted paths their lives took. How often they ended up in jail, or dead in a ditch after a knife fight, or a cabin in the woods with no contact at all with the outside world.
But those weren’t the only stories. People got treatment, found jobs, built families. Created great art. Made the world a better place.
His life would be full of pain, but also beauty and love. So would mine. So was everyone’s.
Solomon could be happy, in a life I couldn’t imagine. One where I played no part, not because he didn’t love me, but because life would take us down two different roads.
He would be okay. So would I.
He held his guitar closer. Strummed three chords. A shiver went through me. The telltale tingle.
“Play me a song,” I said.
He smiled, and started to play. I shut my eyes and saw, as clearly as when I looked through the lens, the story he was telling. Great clouds and bubbles and spreading ink stains of emotion. The eerie power of what he was making, and how his emotions could transfer to me. How he could make me feel what he felt. Music was magic, and he summoned it up from somewhere (the other side) I could not imagine.
“You’re going to do great things,” I said.
“So will you,” he said. “You fucking lunatic. I pity the fools you go up against.”
At the exact same time, we both said, “It takes a certain kind of crazy to change the world.” Then we laughed together. Then we fell silent.
A long serpentine neck rose up out of the water, capped with the beautiful, terrifying head of a water dragon. Blue metal scales glistened in the weak winter sunlight.
“Pretty,” Solomon said, pointing.
“It really is,” I said.
What a gift that sight was. Solomon had taught me how to see a whole other world, but it had nothing to do with our trauma or our brain chemistry. The things he felt—he could make other people feel them too. That was his gift. His magic. It would serve him well in his life as a musician. As an artist. Like me.
I still got glimpses of her, that other Ash. Sometimes she showed me things. Futures, that might or might not be mine. Sometimes she told me things, when I was on the border between waking life and dreams.
We’re all a little bit magic.
The world tries very hard to break us.
Sometimes it succeeds.
We can be broken and still survive.
“This place gets the best sunsets,” I said, pointing across the river. The sky above the Catskill Mountains was painted in broad, messy strokes of mauve and orange and blue gray.
“It does,” he said, and reached out his hand. I took it, and I held it. High overhead, the lights of the bridge came on. Ms. Jackson spoke softly through the open windows of my car. She played old songs we loved. New ones we hated, and would one day discover to our great surprise that we loved.
“It’s okay,” I said, and it was not a lie. “We’re okay.”
Solomon nodded.
I wanted certainty. Clarity. The belief that everything would be fine. That we’d be strong enough to survive whatever the future hit us with.
But I knew I couldn’t have any of those things. I knew nothing in life was promised. Nothing was truly ours. Everything would be taken from us. All we really ever have is the moment we are in—and in that moment, we had each other.