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“See? A wreck. Life’s a fucking wreck.” He shook his head, his expression reading as someone who expected bullshit to happen around the clock.
His life motto was such a stark difference from mine, and although I could see where he came from and what formed him, I wanted him to see that there was an alternative. Life didn’t need to be dreaded. It could be celebrated, even the bad moments, because it all comes together to form a complete story. People don’t rip out the pages they don’t like in a book; they keep reading, move past them, grow through them.
“Here, wear this.” I pulled off my shirt before he could stop me, leaving me in a white tank top, and then I got to work taking off my shorts.
“What? No way. What are you going to wear?”
“My underwear. At least until your things dry. Hang them on the back of the bench.”
Elijah arched a brow and narrowed his eyes. Those beautiful green eyes that had a stranglehold on me like nothing else in the world. “Can’t we just go back to the house?”
“We can, but I feel like we’ve got unfinished business out here. I don’t think our conversation was over.”
He shook his head before shrugging in defeat. He took off his shirt and shorts and set them on the bench, where the sun beat down hard on the dripping wet clothes. He didn’t take mine, though, sitting down in just his briefs, which were also wet (and very see-through). I followed his lead, leaving my clothes off. Fuck it. If he had to be half-naked in the middle of my dad’s farm, then so would I.
“I can’t believe I just ate shit like that. Those poor fish. Must have been thinking a huge gay meteor was coming to wipe them out.”
That got a loud laugh out of me, easing some of the tension that had formed after I challenged Elijah on his “ride the wreck” phrase. “They’re fine. Probably just thought an extra-big chunk of food fell in there.”
“They were about to eat me?”
“Maybe,” I answered, grinning. “I wouldn’t blame them—you’re delicious.”
“Whatever,” Eli said. He smiled, too, his wet hair falling down onto his forehead.
“I didn’t mean to get you upset, by the way. I’m sorry if I pressed a button I shouldn’t have. I just wanted to—I don’t know. I think we live in a world based off perception, and if you perceive things to suck all the time, then chances are they’re going to suck. But if you flip that mental switch, if you start looking at things in a different light, then the suckage is cut in half.”
He cocked a wet eyebrow in my direction. “I just don’t think it’s as easy as being positive all the time. To me that comes across as naïve. Like a little boy who still hadn’t gotten his first big bone break. The world is hard, and no matter how much you smile through shit, it’s still going to be shit.”
“That’s what I want to challenge you on.” I sat on the bench so that I faced him. This particular spot on my dad’s farm provided the most privacy out of anywhere else, surrounded by a wall of swaying sawgrass and towering trees. We couldn’t even see the farmhouse from where we sat. “I’m not saying to close your eyes and force yourself to be happy through whatever life throws at you; I am saying that whatever life throws at you is ultimately temporary. You can wallow in the shit, you can feel like everything’s crumbling and soak in that feeling, but only for a short time. Then you have to get back up and find a way to smile again. Because life isn’t one big car wreck. It’s not. It’s one big car ride, and there are plenty of stops on that ride. Some good, some great, some really fucked-up.”
“I get what you’re trying to say; it’s just… that’s hard for me. I can’t see past the negative. I can’t. It makes me feel ready for when my life does inevitably blow up.”
I put a hand on his knee, his eyes being pulled from the horizon and falling on mine. “That’s what I want you to see differently,” I said. “Why does it have to be inevitable that life blows up? Why can’t it be inevitable that something great is going to happen? I’d like to think that us meeting was inevitable, but you weren’t sitting around stressed about that, were you? So why stress about anything else you can’t control?”
Elijah looked ready to argue but swallowed his words and couldn’t seem to find any more. He looked up at the cotton candy clouds that slowly crossed over us. I could almost hear the wheels spinning in his head as he worked frantically to dismantle what I had just said.
