Carlos the Scientist had spent many years learning to question everything. But he had also learned there are just some things you have to believe to live.
You have to eat. Carlos learns this after the third day of his hunger strike. The cafeteria food isn’t improving, but the feelings of nausea and lightheadedness aren’t either. He can’t afford the time to make his lunches, and he can’t learn without satisfying his hungers. His teachers have only decided that next year, there will be a rule requiring students to eat lunch, even if they don’t have the money.
You have to believe something is real. Carlos realizes this after the fortieth day he wakes up watching his life. No one around him can understand why it’s so important that he could die any day. No one understands that no one would remember him. No one realizes that he could be the only real thing in this world.
Carlos learns this feeling is called solipsism. It doesn’t matter because nothing matters, because nothing is real. This feeling becomes a familiar blanket, later called depersonalization, dissociation, depression. It doesn’t matter what it is, because on the forty-first day, he feels the same.
You have to take care of yourself. Carlos never suddenly has this occur to him. Every time he looks at his hands and arms, there are more scars, bruises, scratches, burns. He looks so tired in the mirror. His clothes are never clean, and he feels dizzy when he stands up too fast. His friends are always concerned, but they have things to concentrate on. They support him, but he alone has to push forward, to make himself do what seems impossible in hopes it gets easier. This comes to him slowly, like rising from a deep pool in his mind.
Some people do care. There is no reason to tell anyone the truth of how he feels. He could smile and say “Fine” or “Tired” and they would just smile and leave him alone. But some people notice the subtleties, and it just becomes so difficult to smile.
Carlos hopes they forgive him. They help him instead. They listen, and they move forward. It was enough.
You should take chances. Carlos is the first alumnus at his high school to have also been hospitalized for more than a month. He has a full ride to college, with an opportunity to do research in any number of areas. But he instead chooses to tutor and take free time every day. He finds himself browsing the library comic books, riding his bicycle, and any number of other “useless” activities.
He realizes he is lonely.
No one knows you are suffering without your help. Carlos is stunned when no one asked why he didn’t leave his room the last four days except for lectures. He hasn’t spoken in almost a week, and was beginning to wear thin. It only comes out when another scientist asks him how the homework was. They gasp and promise to do the next assignment together. It is enough.
He is going to cause suffering. Carlos has long known he will suffer; after all, that’s living. But it’s only when he sees his first boyfriend crying alone after a fight that he realizes he can cause suffering too. And sometimes it is for the best-as he later told Carlos, he didn’t want to date someone who didn’t love him, and they should stay friends.
Carlos wonders if it really could ever get easier.
He is a beautiful person. Carlos, being well within the average height range with a thin face and sad eyes, never thought of himself as anything. He was upset, he was happy, he was a man, but he wasn’t pretty. But then there was someone watching his lab work, recording his answers to mundane questions, begging him to explain their world.
Even when he wasn’t pretty, covered in sand and soot and blood; when he was tired, when he was depressed and crying alone, he realized he could still be beautiful. “Sometimes things seem so strange, or malevolent, and then you find that, underneath, it was something else altogether. Something pure, and innocent,” he thought. Maybe being beautiful to someone wasn’t a path to loss or pain.
A person is most beautiful doing what they love. This wasn’t a realization so much as a lesson. Carlos has heard it said, but Cecil has just listened to forty minutes on galactic formation and nebular births and the future of dark sky. Cecil has not only listened, but kept rapt attention as Carlos devolved into vague gestures. Cecil’s eyes are shining, and Carlos sees a beautiful, wavy reflection inside.
You need to love something to live. Carlos loved himself when he was young. Then he loved science, and it almost never let him down. He loved a vague smiling God, then a parental God, then a questionably moral God that seemed to bless him despite his shortcomings. He loved the ideal of a self-sacrificing love until it consumed his psyche and spit him out a shell, afraid to disappoint. He hesitated to love others beyond sacrificing anything and everything to his friends.
His friends intervened, Cecil pursued, and Carlos wasn’t shy when he realized things could work out this time.
And even if they were separated for over a year, even if he had to almost die, even he spent some days fighting Cecil for every inch of personal space he required, Carlos found it easy to keep trying. Carlos spent every night he could looking up at a starry void, thanking anything that could hear that he was here. Even when he was isolated, Cecil’s memories never truly left him alone.
Cecil never demanded he sacrifice his science. Cecil never asked if he loved science more. Cecil only asked that he lock the closet door if he was going to hide in there.
You need to find a way to love. He wanted to call Cecil every moment, but there was so much science to do. So he only called once a day, twice if it was exciting; he never had a panic attack calling Cecil, because he just… felt so safe. Like talking to himself out loud. But still, after a year living with other people who just didn’t understand under the stupid, malevolent Smiling God, he realized he just wanted to go home.
He wanted to see Cecil again.
You don’t need a mirror for self-reflection. Every day, Carlos had to look deep inside to motivate his happiness. He had to see something good to build off of. Cecil couldn’t have made it easier, but Cecil wasn’t inside his mind. But it was becoming easier. He woke up smiling some days. He woke up crying and went to sleep smiling on others. He couldn’t break every cycle, but they seemed shallower now.
He was becoming enough.