Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

As I washed and rebandaged it in the bathroom, I stared at myself. I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life.

I was thinking about Davis’s journal, of that Frost quote, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life—it goes on.”

And you go on, too, when the current is with you and when it isn’t. Or at least that’s what I whispered wordlessly to myself. Before I left the bathroom, I texted him again. Can we hang out sometime?

I saw the . . . appear, but he never replied.

“We should get going,” Mom said. I opened the bathroom door, pulled a jacket and a knit hat from the coatrack, and entered our frigid garage. I shimmied my fingertips under the garage door, lifted it up, and sat down in the passenger seat while Mom finished making her morning coffee. I kept looking at my phone, waiting for his reply. I was cold but sweating, the sweat soaking into my ski hat. I thought of Davis, hearing his own name on the news again. You go on, I told myself, and tried through the ether to say it to him, too.

—

Over the next few months, I kept going. I got better without ever quite getting well. Daisy and I started a Mental Health Alliance and a Fan-Fiction Workshop so that we could list some proper extracurriculars on next year’s college applications, even though we were the only two members of both clubs. We hung out most nights, at her apartment or at Applebee’s or at my house, sometimes with Mychal but usually not—usually it was just the two of us, watching movies or doing homework or just talking. It was so easy to go out into the meadow with her.

I missed Davis, of course. The first few days, I kept checking my phone, waiting for him to reply, but slowly I understood that we were going to be part of each other’s past. I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.

—

And then one night in April, Daisy and I were over at my house, watching the one-night-only reunion of our favorite band, who were performing at some third-tier music awards show. They’d just brilliantly lip-synced their way through “It’s Gotta Be You,” when someone knocked. It was almost eleven o’clock, too late for visitors, and I felt a shiver of nerves as I opened the door.

It was Davis, wearing a plaid button-down and skinny jeans. He was holding a huge box.

“Um, hi,” I said.

“This is for you,” he told me, and handed me the box, which wasn’t as heavy as I expected. I carried it inside and placed it on our dining room table, and when I turned back, he was already walking away.

“Wait,” I said. “Come here.” I reached my hand out for his. He took it, and we walked together into my backyard. The river was swollen, and you could hear it churning down there in the darkness somewhere. The air felt warm on the skin of my forearms as I lay down on the ground beneath the big ash tree in our backyard. He lay down next to me, and I showed him what the sky looked like from my house, all split up by the branches that were just beginning to sprout leaves.

He told me that he and Noah were moving, to Colorado, where Noah had gotten into some boarding school for troubled kids. Davis would finish high school out there, at a public school. They’d rented a house. “It’s smaller than our current place,” he said. “But on the other hand, no tuatara.”

He asked me how I was doing, and I told him that I felt okay much of the time. Four weeks between visits to Dr. Singh now.

“So when are you leaving?” I asked him.

“Tomorrow,” he said, and that killed the conversation for a while.

“Okay, so,” I said at last, “what am I looking at?”

He laughed a little. “Well, you’ve got Jupiter up there, of course. Very bright tonight. And there’s Arcturus.” He squirmed a bit to turn around and pointed toward another part of the sky. “And there’s the Big Dipper, and if you follow the line of those two stars, right there, that’s Polaris, the North Star.”

“Why’d you tell the cops to look down there?” I asked.

“It was eating Noah up, not knowing. I realized . . . I guess I realized I had to be a big brother, you know? That’s my full-time occupation now. That’s who I am. And he needed to know why his father wasn’t in touch with him more than he needed all the money, so that’s what we did.”

I reached down and squeezed his hand. “You’re a good brother.”

He nodded. I could see in the gray light that he was crying a little. “Thanks,” he said. “I kind of just want to stay here in this particular instant for a really long time.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We settled into a silence, and I felt the sky’s bigness above me, the unimaginable vastness of it all—looking at Polaris and realizing the light I was seeing was 425 years old, and then looking at Jupiter, less than a light-hour from us. In the moonless darkness, we were just witnesses to light, and I felt a sliver of what must have driven Davis to astronomy. There was a kind of relief in having your own smallness laid bare before you, and I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.

And I knew I would remember that feeling, underneath the split-up sky, back before the machinery of fate ground us into one thing or another, back when we could still be everything.

I thought, lying there, that I might love him for the rest of my life. We did love each other—maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again, and I’ll be stuck missing him, and isn’t that so terrible.