A List of Available Smiles - part two
A List of Available Smiles
Part Two
The year wears on and it becomes harder for Dan to get out of his funks - that’s a crap word, why did he ever think of it? But he can’t think of a better one, because he can’t really describe it. It’s not that life becomes one monotonous stream of darkness, more that everything has lowered in tone. Happiness is less happy, sadness is sadder; boredom sinks into melancholy.
The word depression likewise sinks further and further into his brain. He catches himself using it - I’m just feeling depressed - and realises that he doesn’t know what it means. He Wikipedias it and is redirected to Major Depressive Disorder, but that’s wrong. That’s not him. He finds the entry under Depression (mood) and sees the words “dysthymia, a state of chronic depressed mood”. But when he clicks on the link, he sees that it “persists for at least 2 years”. Is that him? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know when this started. Whatever this struggle is, it’s a battle of attrition rather than Blitzkrieg. It doesn’t even feel noticeable. It’s just there, always there, like a shadow as night approaches, always growing, becoming a fact of his existence.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly how Phil would describe falling in love with Dan.
From: YouTube Service
Subject: AmazingPhil sent you a video: “Watch this on your own”
“Hey. So I thought I should say this before we moved in together, because... well, you’ll see.
“Okay. So, you should know this is the fourth time I’ve tried to record this. You would’ve laughed at the second go. A lot. I ended up arguing with myself. Maybe I’ll show you that one day.
“Basically, Dan... I think I’m in love with you. Like, properly in love with you. Oh god, that feels weird. But I really... I don’t know what else to say!”
Neither does Dan. He puts down his headphones, closes the laptop, grabs his keys and walks out of his room.
It’s nearing eleven o’clock, and although it’s early summer, this is Manchester; it’s still cold and Dan doesn’t have a jacket. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t notice. He just walks through campus, out across town, staying in the shadows, alone. He’s practically asking to be mugged, but he doesn’t have anything valuable on him, not even his phone.
His eyes are open, but it’s almost as if they’re refusing to take anything in. He doesn’t see anything. He doesn’t hear anything. There is nothing around him.
These are the things that he doesn’t notice:
The people: the stragglers, the homeless and the clubbers. The colour: advertisements and shop displays and flowerpots put in by the council. The sky: cloudless and star-filled, speckled black velvet. The cracks in the pavement, the architecture of the city centre, the homeless man with a puppy tucked into his hood, the streetlight that flickers orange-black-orange-black, the girl who breaks her heel and laughs delightedly as she prevails upon her boyfriend for a piggy-back, the random pair of shoes hung by their laces from a telephone line, the single car with one lone driver, headlights flashing past in an instant.
He doesn’t notice Dan. Dan doesn’t notice anything.
For hours he just walks, until suddenly he finds himself sitting on the steps outside the shopping centre, half concealed in its shadow. He stares unseeing at the late night revellers. Sod that it’s a weekday, the clubs will be packed with students. None of them notice him though, or perhaps they’re just convincing their drunken brains that the crazy loner staring into space can’t be Dan Howell.
He can’t stay there forever. Eventually a police officer comes over and clears his throat.
“You alright there?” he asks.
Dan blinks. “Yeah.” It comes out as a croak. He tries again. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You a student?”
Dan nods.
“Alright to get home on your own?”
He must look stoned. “Yeah.”
“I suggest you head on back then,” says the policeman. “It’s after two.”
Two o’clock. He’s been out here for hours, he muses idly. And then he blanches.
He hasn’t been thinking at all.
This is the thing: thinking too much may be Dan’s biggest problem, but not thinking at all is just wrong. It’s not who he is.
The police officer is still waiting for an answer. “Yeah,” Dan says. “Thanks. Night.”
Half an hour later, he’s outside Phil’s building, buzzing the intercom. It takes a couple of minutes before Phil’s sleepy voice comes on.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. Can I come up?”
“Of course!”
In the lift, it occurs to Dan that what Phil really wants to hear is a response to his video. But Dan can’t give him that. Not now.
Instead, when Phil opens the door, he is greeted with these words: “There’s something wrong with me. I don’t... Can I...?”
Phil just hugs him.
It’s half past two in the morning, and Dan is suffering from chronic, if mild, depression, and Phil is in love with him, and it’s looking more and more likely that he’s not going to pass his first year at uni, and here they are just hugging in the middle of night.
I should be crying, Dan thinks.
He doesn’t.
***
“What happened?” Phil asks.
In deference to the hour they’re both sprawled over Phil’s bed, Dan staring up at the ceiling, Phil looking down at Dan. They haven’t turned the light on; there’s just a faint orange glow from the streetlights below. Phil’s face is lit. Dan’s is not.
“I don’t really know,” Dan says. “I was just watching the video you sent me and then it was like my brain couldn’t cope any more.”
There’s a beat, then Phil exhales sharply - it might be a stillborn chuckle. “Nice to know that me telling you I love you pushed you over the edge.”
Those words should be harder to say, Dan thinks. They trip off Phil’s tongue like he’s said them a thousand times. Perhaps he has, and Dan just hasn’t been listening.
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t that. It was more...”
He closes his eyes. It’s hard to think with Phil waiting on his answer, but at the same time he’s so glad he’s got Phil there to ask the questions. With that thought, something solidifies and he says,
"I would love to be your boyfriend. But I don't think I can."
"What do you mean?"
Again Dan has to take a second to work out what he's thinking before he voices it. "I don't think there's enough of me. Like, I'm barely there for myself. I can't be anything to anyone else at the moment. But the thing is..." He casts about for an appropriate metaphor. "Have you ever been seasick?"
"Yeah. It wasn't pretty."
Dan smiles without meaning it. "The worst thing about seasickness is that if you're on the boat for long enough, you forget what it was like not to feel sick. So it's like... I know there's something wrong me. I probably know what's wrong with me, even. But I don't feel like I know what I should be like, what I should be aiming for. Do you... Do you get what I mean?"
Phil's biting his lip. "Maybe? I don't know. I don't understand how you can be aiming to be someone. To me, it's like... You're still you, you're just... not quite."
Dan waits for Phil to find the right final word, but none is forthcoming. Not quite. It doesn't feel right, to him. There's so much missing. He's like a piano with every string above middle C cut.
Phil's hand takes his. "I can try to help you?" he says, tentatively. "If you want. If I can."
Dan's smile this time is more genuine. "Thank you." But he sighs.
"What?"
"This is why I can't be your boyfriend. Because you would give me so much and I've got nothing to give you."
Phil looks like he wants to argue that point, but in the end chooses not to. "Okay. I still love you though."
"I'd love to say it back, but..."
"I know," says Phil. He squeezes Dan's hand. "Let's get some sleep, yeah?"
They fall asleep with six clear inches of space between them. They wake up with Phil pressed against Dan's back, one arm draped protectively over his waist, and lie there until they really can't pretend to be asleep any longer. Dan misses a revision session because of it, but does not - and cannot - care.
Three weeks later, he finds out that he's failed his exams.
***
"I knew it was going to happen," he tells Phil, miserably. "I'll just have to retake it in August."
"Is there any way you can get, like, a doctor's certificate?" Phil asks.
"Not after getting the results," Dan points out. "Anyway, I don't want to go to the doctor's."
By this stage, they've moved into their new flat opposite the maximum security prison. It's surprisingly easy as transitions go, but then Dan had practically moved into Phil's old flat after his breakdown, so they're sort of used to each other's rhythms by now.
And when Dan had shut himself in his room for three solid hours, Phil had known that the best thing to do was to barge in and demand to know what was wrong.
"Why not?" he asks now.
"Because I'm not... Okay, I've probably got depression" - the first time he's said so aloud - "but it's not like I'm suicidal. I haven't got clinical depression, major depressive disorder, whatever. I'm just depressed. It doesn't feel like an illness."
"But it sort of is," Phil argues.
"Yeah, and doesn't that sound groovy. 'Hi, I'm Dan and I'm mentally ill.'"
Tactfully, Phil chooses to ignore this. "But what about antidepressants and stuff? Wouldn't it be worth..."
"Mood-altering drugs?" Dan scoffs. "How would that solve the problem?"
"Well, what is the problem?"
That, Dan reflects, is a very good question. But is it an answerable one?
"Write it down," Phil suggests when Dan doesn't respond. "Or make me a video."
Dan nods. "Okay. D'you wanna play Guitar Hero for a bit?"
And soon enough he's laughing at Phil's utter lack of rhythm. Phil tells him to shut up, which of course makes him lose his place in the song, and Dan just keeps chuckling. Because this is the truth of depression: it doesn't stop you laughing. It doesn't stop you smiling. It just stops you laughing whole-heartedly, truly feeling happy. Laughter is physical; depression is mental. The one is brief, the other becomes your constant. And it tugs at you, nags you: this laughter doesn't last, it tells you. Laughter never lasts.
***
He waits until Phil is asleep before making the video. It feels a little bit weird talking to someone through a camera when he could probably talk to him through the wall if he raised his voice a bit. It’s two o’clock when he finally turns his webcam on. It’s too dark for the camera to pick him up, but rather than turning the light on, he opens a blank Word document so the screen will do the job. It’ll make him look like a ghost, but that’s how he feels right now, anyway.
"Okay, so I haven't planned this," he cautions. "Sorry if it ends up half an hour long. Right then, problems I don't think antidepressants would solve."
He starts off with the obvious: his law degree, both the fact that he's failing it and the fact that he's in no way sure that he wants to devote his life to law.
"I wish I'd done a really non-specific degree now," he says. "Like English or something. I feel like... Well let's be honest, I'm not going to do anything but YouTube for years, if I can get away with it. But what after that?"
From there, he moves onto the essential shallowness of YouTube, its ageism and ruthlessness. The futility - as soon as you've uploaded one video, they're just clamouring for the next. There's no sense of fulfilment.
Next it's the issue of presenting a facade. His YouTube videos demand a persona, but sometimes he feels like every interaction demands a persona too, one completely divorced from whoever the fuck he might actually be.
"Like, when I'm with my extended family, I'm being a sensible, smart young lad doing a sensible degree. And with my parents and my other friends, I'm being... Well, myself. But myself like I should be, like I was. It's so weird, acting myself. Like being in Extras, but natural. It feels like it's all so dishonest, but it's constant. How many people can you really be honest with? And out of those, how many would you choose to be completely honest with? I don't mean like not telling lies, I mean saying every crazy thought that comes into your head. Only saying sorry when you're guilty. Telling someone no, even when it's the wrong thing to do."
And then it's the ache to be understood.
"And I know it's impossible," he says. "To completely understand someone else, you'd have to be that person, and I wouldn't wish being me on anyone. But you sort of think: what's the point? If I don't really know you, if we can't ever know each other... Like, even now, I'm basically pouring out my heart to you, but I don't know if you completely understand. I don't think you can. I mean, I can't fully understand you either, but it's like, if you know it's not possible, why do we all bother trying? Why do we talk for hours on end, why do we make these videos if they won't fulfil their one purpose, which is to make you understand?"
From there, it's a small step to the futility of life in general.
"It's a cliché, sure, but I just feel like none of it has any real purpose. My YouTube videos are't exactly going to be in the history books. Charlie's might, but the rest of us, we're not the face of new media. We're just light entertainment, to be dropped as soon as we're not funny enough, or pretty enough. And not just YouTube - everything. What the hell does it matter what I do, what anyone does? We're all just going to die anyway. Even if I won a Nobel Prize for finding the cure to cancer - it doesn't stop anyone dying. It just prevents it for a bit longer. At the end of the day there's nothing left."
He stops. He feels empty and heavy at the same time. With a great, shuddering sigh, he comes to his last point.
"And the last thing: I'm not being fair to you. Everything you do for me, listening to these existential spiels, distracting me, waiting for me... I feel so selfish, making you do all that. And arrogant, like I believe that all my petty problems are worth hearing, and that I'm worth waiting for."
"You are."
Dan jolts upright and slams his laptop shut. "When did you get here?" he demands, flicking the switch of his amber lamp.
Phil edges through the door which he'd opened just an inch or two without Dan noticing. "About thirty seconds ago. I went to get some milk and heard you talking."
A terrible thought occurs to Dan. "Oh shit, that better've saved."
Upon opening the laptop, thankfully, it appears that Microsoft's dodgy autosave has kicked in and the video is safe.
"Thank god," Dan sighs. "I was not about to do all that again."
"Sorry."
"Yeah, you should be."
But the hit of adrenaline provided by Phil's unexpected interruption is ebbing, the sarcasm falls flat, and the emptiness is stealing over him once more. He closes the laptop again, more gently this time, and sets it down by the side of the bed.
"You are worth it," Phil says quietly. "All of it."
"You sound like a Hallmarks production line," Dan says, mainly because he doesn't believe it.
Perhaps Phil realises that, because he doesn't take offence but instead just smiles and asks, "Can I sleep in here tonight?"
"Yeah," Dan replies, and slides under the covers as Phil turns out the light and comes to join him. "Thanks," he whispers, quieter in the darkness.
"You're welcome," Phil says.
This time when they wake, they’re facing each other, their limbs a tangled mess between them, and they really can't pretend they're still asleep so they don't even try. Instead, Dan gently disentangles one arm to he can hold Phil's hand. And then, because both of them are so loath to move, they end up falling asleep again.
Just as he's dozing off, Dan hopes that they'll still be holding hands when he wakes up.
***
Phil watches the video the next morning direct from Dan's laptop - Dan's skeevy about putting it online just in case he accidentally makes it public.
"If you got a Mac, you wouldn't have to worry about that," Phil teases.
"Apple fanboy," Dan retorts.
But after watching it through twice, Phil is quiet, thinking. Dan waits on tenterhooks for him to come to some sort of conclusion. He so wants Phil to appreciate what he's said, to understand it.
“The thing is,” Phil says, eventually, “a lot of what you’re saying is right. Just objectively right. Like the world ending and everyone dying. There’s nothing you can really do about that. But then, I think you’re kind of right about the way YouTube works, too, but I think there are things we can do about that.”
‘Things’ turn out to be using YouTube as a platform, establishing themselves and then moving on to other media. Some people Phil knows from uni have gone into radio, and the BBC have a good track record of working with YouTubers - there was that Chartjackers project a few years back, and they put Charlie on Doctor Who Confidential...
“And even just within YouTube, there’s ChannelFlip and MyDamnChannel and all that. There are things we can do. It’s not a complete dead end.”
But the thing that really stumps Phil is Dan’s law degree. Unlike questions about the futility of life, this is an actual, practical issue, and he seems to feel that he should therefore be able to do something about it. Unfortunately, there just isn’t an easy answer.
“I’ll just have to try to do well in my retake, I guess,” Dan says.
But that won’t solve any of the fundamental problems with doing the course in the first place.
“I’ll deal with it in August,” he decides. “But you haven’t talked about the last bit of the video.”
“I thought I covered that last night,” Phil says, surprised. “You are definitely worth waiting for. And really - you’re not putting me to any trouble. Listening to you, talking through things with you, it’s - not exactly nice, because, you know, but it’s something I want to be doing.”
“Thank you,” Dan says, suddenly. “I seriously appreciate it. I really don’t know where I’d be without you.”
The light in Phil’s eyes abruptly dies.
“That’s a bit scary,” he admits. “What if I do something wrong?”
The long and foreboding list of side effects hangs unspoken between them.
“I don’t think you could,” Dan says.
Phil doesn’t argue, but Dan can see that he’s still worried. He doesn’t really know why. Phil couldn’t hurt a butterfly. There’s no way he’ll hurt Dan.
“I’ll do my best,” Phil says. “Promise.”
Part three