(courtesy Harper Collins Australia)
Life all too often feels like a series of endless goodbyes.
Or possible goodbyes anyway; just when things seem to have settled into a pleasing and happy pattern, and we feel like this life things is forming itself into some existentially rich and satisfying shapes, along comes change and BOOM! … it all goes out the window again.
That unsettlingly constant dynamic can strike at any time in our life but it’s when we’re younger and so much is changing so quickly – let’s be honest; it all slows down as we get older and even when the blender of new things comes along, we seem to roll with it better (well, mostly) – that it hits hardest, something that Alice Oseman of Heartstopper fame, makes achingly beautifully clear in her novella, Nick and Charlie.
A hybrid of her usual graphic novels and the more usual YA book form, Nick and Charlie does a delightfully good job in just 160 pages of art and written storyline in conveying what it’s like when you’re in your teens and what feels sure and dependable suddenly develops a disturbing case of the wobbles and you wonder how much longer you’ll be able to count on it being there.
Still deeply in love and part of a #couplesgoals relationship which is the envy of friends like Tao and Elle – who to be fair, are kicking those togethersome goals too – Charlie’s sister Tori and Charlie’s good friend Aled, Nick and Charlie are at a great big cross roads in their intimately joined lives.
We lean our heads together and I make a peace sign with one hand and take another picture. Then I take one of us actually kissing, but I don’t put that on Tumblr. Some things are nicer if they’re just for us.
For Nick, one year ahead of Charlie and about to graduate high school, is heading off to university in Leeds, hundreds of miles away, and while they tell each other they will absolutely mail the whole long distance thing, Charlie, who you will recall if you’re one of the many millions obsessed, quite rightly, with Heartstopper, has struggled with a number of mental health and general health issues like anxiety and eating disorders, isn’t handling the impending loss of Nick’s close proximity all that well at all.
He wants to and he knows he can but somewhere in the middle of studying for final exams and being Head Boy and going to the occasional party, Charlie has let his fear and worry consume him to the point where what seemed doable and achievable feels like mission impossible without Tom Cruise’s sure hand to guide the way.
All he wants is for their “kind of boring” life, full of school night sleepovers, s*x, movies, food and talking to continue uninterrupted and while he knows that can’t possibly happen because LIFE, he desperately want it to, to the extent that he begins to fall apart.
So much so that at one crucial part of Nick and Charlie it seems like the two have broken up … WAIT! THEY’VE WHAT?!
What actually really happens is best left to the reading of this wonderful book, which captures the heartbeat and raw honesty of Heartstopper so perfectly, but suffice to say Nick and Charlie affectingly and humourously drives home the point that change is the only real constant in life.
(courtesy official author site)
Again, as you get older, that becomes an inescapable fact of life.
But think back to your teenage years when change seemed to move so fast that what seemed locked in and indisputably loaded at breakfast, seems like a fever dream of impossibility by lunch; when life is that fluid and that messy, you cling to whatever seems to stand still long enough to firm and dependable.
And that’s what Nick is for Charlie and honestly Charlie is for Nick; while first loves, as the back cover blurb of Nick and Charlie rather sagely and a little portentously sadly admits, rarely last forever, you get the feeling that maybe this is one gorgeously devoted couple that might defy the odds, that might be able to stare life and its constant frenetic whirl of musical chairs down and actually make something that works astoundingly well last the distance.
But when you’re young, what seems excitingly possible, can seem beautifully impossible too, especially when, like Charlie, you are living with something like entrenched anxiety which twists and turns reality and sane rational though into spaghetti strands of worry and panic and endless, inner voice haranguing worry.
For anyone who’s never lived with anxiety, especially when you’re younger, it might seem strange that you can’t just rationally switch it off and talk yourself out of it, but the truth is, it just work that way and one of the great appealing strengths of Nick and Charlie is that it is unflinchingly and affectingly honest about this.
I used to think I was pathetic for thinking soppy, romantic stuff like that. I don’t any more. I just keep thinking it. I keep wanting him here. I keep wanting him to stay.
Pondering whether absence actually makes the heart grow fonder – maybe it does but who the hell is really in a rush to find out? – Nick and Charlie is that rare and delightful story that both doesn’t dole out easy answers but which stakes its emotional surety on the fact that maybe there are people who can roll with change and come out the other side together and still very much in love.
Things are going to change, and Charlie finally accepts that and makes a remarkable accommodation with it, but he learns on the way to that great epiphany, which takes a lot of very flawed but understandably hesitant emotional manoeuvring, that it doesn’t have to be a bad or catastrophic thing.
That’s a tough lesson to learn but he gets there in ways that will enthrall and delight and maybe even worry you a bit (or a lot) in Nick and Charlie and it’s that journey to coming to grips with one of life’s great certainties that makes this novella such a rewardingly honest read.
Capturing what it’s like when you discover for the first time just how wildly changeable life can be, even when you might be expecting it, Nick and Charlie is a beautifully addition to the Heartstopper canon, one more step in the grand, queer, emotionally honest and heartfelt love story of Nick and Charlie who may yet defy the odds and find love that lasts a lifetime and distance and all the things that might gets in its way.