"...if you haven't lived it, you won't understand.
And if you have lived it, why would you want to remember?"
I read On the Road when I was 17.
Asked my literature teacher for something philosophical. I wanted to understand Life, haha.
She said The Name of the Rose, I grabbed Kerouac. It became my favorite book.
I didn't understand life, but I felt it in full.
The way you can only feel it at 17.
Now, at 35, I read 18% Gray.
Cried my eyes out.
Why?
Because the road, both Sal's and Zak's, turned out to be the same.
A road you set out on to discover the world, only to find yourself lost.
People remember different things.
Strange, random fragments.
Faces trampled on the asphalt.
Scattered cigarette ash.
A buzzing fly.
A touch across the waist.
He remembers the hands.
The palms. The fingers. The movements.
How they hold a glass of water or hand him a coin.
Sometimes they curl slightly from nervousness.
And sometimes they just wait.
To know someone's hands is to know what's hidden in them.
And when those hands are gone?
You're left with one person you don't want to talk to.
Yourself.
(And that's when it gets scary.)
18% Gray is not a novel about love or its loss.
It's not a novel about a broken heart.
This is a novel about separation.
A novel about being torn apart.
Irreversible. Final.
Stella is part of Zak.
Perhaps the most tender and vulnerable part of his hidden self.
When she leaves, he experiences it as if she's been ripped from him.
Amputated.
He can no longer be the same.
The world can no longer be the same.
And there's no one to give him back his arm.
18% Gray is a novel about existential crisis.
A crisis of meaning.
A crisis of identity.
Who are you, if everything you defined yourself by is gone?
Who are you and what would you do, if you're nobody?
If there's something to hold onto,
it's the things you love.
The things that set you on fire.
What you're passionate about.
Not the people you love.
The things.
Photography, drawing, writing, reading.
Motorcycles, football.
Cooking ratatouille slowly.
Playing piano at night.
Swimming at dawn.
The people you love can't save you.
The things you love can't either.
They won't save you.
But they'll help you.
They'll pull you through.
Somehow.
Because they're the rope that keeps you tied to the world.
And to yourself.
Sometimes life doesn't offer you a hand. It smacks you with a wrench.
Then you don't need to believe in the future.
You just need to get there.
And so Zak tries to crawl his way to New York.
What he'll do after that doesn't really matter.
What matters is reaching the goal.
Whole.
Or in pieces, but stitched together.
A modern Frankenstein of the 21st century.
Crossing America, Zak takes photographs.
A white pickup by a mailbox.
A man with three underage blondes.
A homeless guy, sleeping with his head on cardboard boxes.
A herd of cows, staring into the lens.
Zak doesn't photograph because he's a photographer. He's been nobody for a while now.
He doesn't photograph for money. He's already a dealer.
He doesn't photograph to impress. There's no one left.
Zak photographs.
Just photographs.
Zak himself is a bit rough around the edges and somewhat awkward.
Insecure, sometimes jealous, explosive, uncompromising.
Deeply shaken.
Fragile, but resilient.
Enduring.
Like a cannabis stalk: it bends, it sways, but it doesn't break.
And yet he's someone you could live with.
Laugh with (I laughed out loud!),
travel with,
grieve with,
drink beer with
and ask each other:
Man, how the hell did we end up here?!
In photography, there's a value: 18% gray.
It keeps the balance between light and darkness.
A point of equilibrium.
Of objectivity.
But in the novel, it's something much more.
A place where you gather yourself,
when you're on the edge of falling apart
between the extremes of black and white.
Not a place to live.
But a point of temporary salvation.
In the end, maybe this really isn't a novel about the road, love, or loss.
Maybe it's a novel about that moment when you're left alone with your vulnerability.
You embrace it like a bag of marijuana
and move forward with it.
Not because you know what to do.
But because you can't bear doing nothing.
No promises, no expectations,
but with that 18% gray in your eyes,
which will catch the sign on some rusty station:
"Life is beautiful."
Scrawled.
With a ballpoint pen.
It might be a lie.
But it does the job.