November 3rd, 2025 - Outcomes

Dear TNY,

“Outcomes” is what you served this week, and I bellied right up to it.

I liked it? 

Let’s first say that I’m sick.  After all that travel, I woke up late Sunday night and it felt like my face was exploding from the inside.  So I’ve been working the Quils, day and night, and have been ingesting beer as well, sometimes doing small doses of weed candy.  My body is healing the sick in the background while I’m turning into melted cheese in the foreground and resting it off on the cot.

I tell you all that to say I don’t know if I’m a credible witness right now.

But I liked it.  Not all of it.  Nope.  But there were parts.  The structure, breaking it into two pieces from two different perspectives, at first I didn’t think would work because I thought it was a POV shift too late in the game.  But because it never shifted back, it was more like a black and white cooking, having clearly defined sections.  I loved how tender their relationship forming was.  The author really captured those moments of insecurity in both characters, which is, after you get to this age, way more interesting than almost anything in the beginning of a relationship (to be beaten only by love at first sight, which is the very best thing there is).  And the difference in perspectives, both character and age, was well done.  I liked how the female’s perspective was looking back, so it was lensed through her older knowing, yet the male’s perspective was the undeniable deliciousness of an unknown and golden future.  Also, I liked the fact that the story focused on mostly just two people and their interactions, which is how I prefer a short story.

There were parts in the first half regarding his past and the school stuff that had drag to them.  And I wasn’t keen on the school shooting thing as I felt, initially, it was too left political, a thing you like to do with your literature (to be clear, I don’t care what direction anyone is, I just don’t like politics being shoved down my throat in literature).  That being said, I also realize America’s school shooting epidemic is a fucking global embarrassment and is weekly news, and is also a good mechanism to ensure the male’s death would make national news, which is what the author needed to do to get that name in front of the female.

Overall, one of the better stories you have published in a while.

Again, could be drugs.

Or, it could be that I love love.  I love connection.  I love feeling like you and a special lady are on a super secret task to uncover treasures long since hidden and anything outside that little gear closet doesn’t exist.  I love whisperbullshitting and gentle instruction and teaching and being taught.  And I love the unexpected, when ordinary things suddenly become those moments in the backseat of a car.  I love all of it.  I love comparing bodies, how much smaller her wrists are, how much more slender her fingers are, how small her rib cage is compare to mine, almost like bedding down a bird, bones so light and delicate I’m afraid of harming, yet seeing her hips bare that first time, the skin clefts where her thighs join her pelvis, hips wider than mine, me, sometimes being behind, always remembering a line from a book I read 20 years ago, how the character remembered the feel of thumbs over the kidneys, the pressure and warmth, long after the event was over.  I love washing her hair or smelling the sweat of her armpits or feeling the crevasses of her yellow heels scratch against my shins at night.  I love love.  All the way home.

I did therapy again this week.  Things are right.  I spent a long time thinking I grew up to be the villain.  But I didn’t.  Not even the antihero.  Instead, I grew up to be a mostly good but flawed human.  And that’s pretty good.

Oh!  One last thought.  I finally understood something I have been thinking about for 10 years.  Wayne White coined the phrase “Beauty is embarrassing.”  And for years I’ve tried to distill what that means.  I have on these pages.  But I finally got it last night.  I had to add the word “real” to make it “real beauty is embarrassing.”  And then it made sense.  If someone tells you you are beautiful, and you are embarrassed, that’s beauty.  If you aren’t embarrassed, that’s not real beauty.  I see it as a test now, for everything.  Litmus for life. 

Anyway, I’m really out on these meds, maybe I’ll remember writing this tomorrow.  Maybe not.

With love,

Nick