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Jonathan thought for the longest of time that the saddest thing in the world was the utter and total way in which Jim Hopper loved his mother. Not many people were aware of it–his brother, Murray, Jonathan himself–and he wasn’t even sure Joyce fully understood or recognized it. When he was a younger, he used to tease the fact with Will, but after Hopper had a gruff conversation with him in the cab of his pickup truck, needless to say it was a mistake he never made again.
Still.
He had to wonder exactly how willfully blind the two were.
Hopper looked at his mother like she was a part of himself, as much a part of him as the greys in his hair and bags under his eyes and scars on his knuckles. She was his no matter what new man came along, no matter who died–but he wouldn’t verbally claim her even if the pair were on the brink of annihilation.
Years later, Jonathan decided the saddest thing in the world was the disintegration of his parents’ relationship–not because it wasn’t a good thing they had separated, but because his mother would never get over Lonnie Byers. It was like she was caught under some strange spell, the compartments of her mind sticky from all his father’s spilled alcohol, trapping only good memories the pair had shared, and willfully, blindly, shoving the rest away.
He wondered, quietly, if the real reason she never got over him was because of her pride. There’s something to be said about that first real relationship. About digging in one's heels and trying to make it work. Joyce had failed in that. She threw away her happiness.
(He promised to never be that stupid. He promised not to love like that and not to gleefully destroy potential happiness with a knack for his own personal spin on masochism.)
Even more years later, Hopper decided that the saddest thing in the world was the utter and total way Jonathan loved–
–
Joy was fighting and learning and making amends. Joy was a shared look and a complicated relationship and a split joint smoked behind the movie theatre. Joy was pretending to be amnesiatic as joking payback after Steve accidentally hit him in the back of the head with a baseball and seeing how incredibly devastated his eyes were in the split-second before Jonathan hastily and guiltily called off the prank. Joy was a Friday night spent drinking gas station beer at the quarry cliffside. Joy was picking up Steve from the video store with Robin in tow when his car was in the shop. Joy was receiving one of Steve’s rare, real smiles.
It was happiness. A fleeting shimmer on a heat-hazy day, illusory and effervescent.
–
He was never really in love with Nancy Wheeler, but she had these beautiful big, brown eyes and she too knew better than to fall fully in love with him. For this, he was thankful.
He couldn’t have what he really wanted anyway. He had burned any possible opportunity for the kind of life he never let himself dream of when he told his mother, “I’ve thought about it and I already declined the offer to NYU.”
Jonathan settled for silver in so many ways.
–
“Do you want to get engaged?” Nancy asked him one day.
“Do you?” asked Jonathan in return.
“It would make sense,” Nancy told him. “Logically, that is.”
“I guess it would,” Jonathan had replied.
When Jonathan told his family about the specifics of this anticlimactic conversation one night, Hopper, drunk out of his mind, burst out laughing and asked who they were trying to kid. Jonathan didn’t understand, but that was okay because he too drank himself stupid and didn't remember the man’s words after waking the next morning.
–
He was nineteen and Steve left town.
It happened like this: they were still covered in blood from the most recent mishap involving the world beyond worlds (blood sticky in their hair and staining the shirt that had been dropped in the alley and stubbornly setting into the grooves of their fingernails) and Jonathan was holding back sobs the whole time, his ribs broken in three places. Steve had kept his eyes closed as he brought him to his feet, his fingers rough against his shoulder with broken nails.
“I can’t do this anymore, man,” Jonathan thinks the other might have said, holding him up against a brick wall. There was a cough and more blood and Steve wiped Jonathan’s face, his mouth, and whispered, “You should come with me.”
Later, he woke up in the hospital and found out Steve left town and took off in the middle of the night. Six months later, he received a letter in the mail. There was no return address, and all it said was:
I’m sorry. I was scared and didn’t want to see someone I–
I didn’t want to see you die.
Jonathan never forgives him, but he also never forgets.
(The joints and the drives and the gas station beers and the wonderfulness of Steve's laughter six drinks in and how the warmth in his voice could swallow him whole, burying his very body in safety in the most easiest of ways with one singular, simple, enormous, unforgettable smile.)
He tries to move on.
–
Hopper showed up at his mothers house the day of Jonathan’s engagement party half an hour before it started. He initially said he wouldn’t be able to make it–some sort of business with the police, some sort of trip, some sort of excuse–but when he did he was half drunk and smelled of fresh whiskey and hazy cigarettes. Jonathan didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to hear his sad story, didn't want to fight, but Hopper cut him off at the door, and asked, “Kid–why are you doing this?”
And all Jonathan could reply with, slowly, jarringly, was, “I want to be happy.”
Hopper had snorted and shook his head, pushing back off the step and flicking his ashing cigarette butt onto the lawn. He didn’t look back as he wobbled towards his truck when he said, “Stupid kid. Stupid life. Jonathan, ya’ know I’m so sick of stupid shit, so sick of fucking tragedies. I’m sick of lovers not becoming lovers and people giving up too young and people not getting what they deserve. You're a fucking coward, kid. Just like your dad.”
Jonathan blinked, not understanding through the flash of his nerves, wanting to raise his fists and fight back and feel blood and squash the shame.
Instead, he said nothing.
Hopper guffawed again and took off in his pickup truck, a silent goodbye.
Eight months later, Steve mailed him another letter. This time there was a book with it. It was a novel in which the main character never got hurt and no one was ever refused love and others never asked too much.
Jonathan read it once, then twice, and then three times before he threw the book into the quarry.
There was an address in the book, too, written on the very last page.
Jonathan never wrote a letter.
–
There were dying times, like all conflicts have. There were times for too-loud looks and too-desperate confessions and too-bright lights and too-heavy panic. Dying times. Living times. Time to live before they died.
There was a kiss, just once. A kiss to have before they died. Like an explosion or a wave, like every overwhelming and awing and entrancing force of nature in existence. Jonathan had three broken ribs and was spitting up blood, but it was like lava was replacing his bones and his hands were becoming part of the brick wall they were braced against because it was never going to end, thank god.
It was–
–
Steve. He flies into town again, a flash of messy hair and chrome accessories that sparkle and fade against the washed out brown of his aging BMW and Jonathan stares, mesmerized by the life he leads. Happy and free. Unfettered and far away. Untouchable, but not forgotten.
The two don't talk and Steve doesn't look at him, but he never sees him smile, either.
The river nearby changes colour with the seasons.
Steve leaves.
Jonathan feels hollow and empty and the engagement band on his finger flashs gold and yellow and the hole in his chest fills with the chasing of that warmth he had felt once. That explosion. He looked for it in Nancy. Looked and tried and clawed and clung and dug deeper than he’s ever dug before.
Jonathan turned twenty-two and realized he was never going to find it in her.
–
Jonathan remembered–
There was a time–before he had settled at far too young–when he–
Well, Steve of course.
Pining after another man hadn’t seemed like such a terrible life. He hadn’t had a problem with the feelings or concept or inhumanely impossibly desire to simply be wanted in the same way he threw himself–all of himself–into feeling for another human being. But it was lonely. Bone achingly lonely and Steve would never want him back in the same way he wanted him (or so he had thought).
That’s why he stayed quiet.
Jonathan wouldn’t choose the brighter path. Instead, he would fit into a small town narrative. He would fit and stay frozen, clutching apathy with his long, nimble fingers after years of being thoroughly fucked with by life.
After his engagement, Jonathan thought about promises and happiness and masochism. He thought about his mother. He thought about Hopper. Jonathan thought about huge emotional distances and impossible wants that had never gone away. Jonathan thought about warmth and the human connection made impossible by the inscrutable pen strokes–about laws and morals and societal ethics, and invisibility and anonymity and distance.
Sometimes, even at twenty-three, Steve still sent him letters.
Jonathan thought about how he truly wasn’t happy, but how he could be.
Five days later, Jonathan Byers broke up with Nancy Wheeler.
She didn’t fight it, didn’t tell him to stay, and when he packed the last of things, piling haphazardly taped cardboard boxes into the backseat of his car, Nancy smiled at him.
He knew she would be okay.
He picks up a pen and writes a letter.
(Here I am. Here I am tired of wanting. Here I am).
Three weeks later, Jonathan meets up with Steve in a far away city, in a far away bar, and Steve smiles. It's still as blindingly warm as ever.