Title: The Genius Next Door

Number of chapters: 15 + epilogue

Word count: 70k + total, 1595 for this part

Cover image by: Eric Rougier

Summary: Serve God, love me and mend. This is not the end. - Mumford and Sons

Warnings: Please click on my profile for a full list of warnings if you need them.

Other notes: I'm going to update this every Monday and Friday from here on out. In other words, the last chapter of this story + the epilogue will both be posted on the 29th of July 2013. Thank you everyone for your support!

Why?

Beloved reader, that is, indeed, the question.

When I set out to write this story, that was the only word I had in mind. Why? After every chapter I finished, I asked myself it again. Unfortunately, I didn't know the answer. I don't think I ever will.

You see, none of the events that have happened in this novel are particularly true. I mean, except for a few things. When I was very young, my family and I went to visit Marseille, and there was this blue-eyed boy who was staying in the hotel room next to us. He was about the same age as me. For the six-day vacation that I was there, we only interacted once, even though we ended up seeing each other in a lot of the places we went to.

The one time we talked was the last day we were staying in Marseille. We were at the beach, and he was building some sort of castle. I went to speak with him. "Hello," I'd said. "My name's —"

"Don't tell me it," he'd interrupted. "I don't want to know."

I was a little taken aback, but that was the only time the boy ever snapped at me from then on. We became incredibly close in the short three-hour period that we spent together. And for some reason, I felt myself inexplicably attached to this boy whose name I didn't know.

It's because the boy smiled a lot. He always looked as if he was happy — and for all I know, he could have been perpetually happy. I don't know why. He smiled like he had some great big secret that he couldn't let the world in on. He smiled when I tossed sand in his hair, smiled when I tracked water all over his castle, smiled when he was stung by a jellyfish. It wasn't the creepy kind of smile, either. I mean, he cried out in pain when he was stung, sure, but after that, he just laughed it off.

Keep in mind we were both children.

Since I never got to learn the boy's name, I started calling him the Genius Next Door in my mind, because this was the boy who had the answers to everything. Maybe he didn't know how to solve advanced physics problems or know how to build a sandcastle strong enough to withstand a bit of water, but he was happy. And yeah, I mean, he was a kid, and kids are usually happy, but this boy was something else. So he became the Genius Next Door.

I thought about him a lot as the years went on. When I got into high school, I realized I might've been a little gay or something. But not for any of the male students I knew. For the blue-eyed boy of Marseille's shores. He became my inspiration as I pursued the things I loved, like performance art and music and literature. Whenever I took a test, I prayed that TGND would help me through it. When my mother killed herself, I prayed that TGND would help me through the particularly difficult time. When I got into alcohol and drugs, TGND was the one I hallucinated lying alone in my room with all the windows shut. He was a grown man by then. I was in love with a fantasy.

It wasn't until I was 15 that my Japanese friend Kiku told me about the red string of fate and introduced me to the concept of soul mates. He said that everyone would find theirs one day. I asked, what if they're siblings? What if one's super old and one's super young? What if they're both males or both females?

Kiku said none of that mattered, because soul mates meant soul mates and that your soul mate is literally perfect for you. If he's fifty and you're twenty-five and he's your soul mate it didn't matter that he was twice your age, he was still yours.

Then I asked, can we each only get one? Kiku answered yes. I asked, so, what if they haven't been born yet, or was already born a hundred years ago?

He was stumped. "I don't think that happens," he'd responded. "Soul mates mean perfection. They're perfect for you. They can't be perfect for you if they're already dead."

But it was after getting rejected by my dream college and then getting my heart broken over a few guys and then watching my dad die, too, that I realized that nothing was perfect in the world. The soul mate concept literally could not exist. Half my friends were in relationships, and half of those relationships were already at the marriage-level, and yet these friends fought with their so-called 'destined lovers' all the time, and over the silliest things. Where to put the plates. Who's picking up Matthew from school. You forgot to turn on the AC and now it's suffocatingly hot, thanks a lot you good-for-nothing jackass.

Sometimes there were fights over larger issues, too. Like why did you cheat on me? Like what do we do now that you have a disease that will one day kill you?

And yet I still saw that some couples actually worked well with each other — just not on their bad days sometimes. Even with issues like cancer and cheating in their minds.

So I questioned this. Why? I asked. So we all have a soul mate, but none of us are ever going to meet them because the circumstances we were born in just so happened that maybe we're not rich enough to travel the world in search of them or maybe we're not born in the same century?

And then I realized that I could have possibly already found mine. TGND.

Of course, we'd only played together for three hours. But those were the happiest three hours of my life, and I'd felt something — a connection of sorts, I don't know. Something was there. Something larger-than-life.

And that was when I came across the revelation that I was never going to meet TGND again. Because I'd never learned his name. Because the last time we'd spoken was over two decades ago. Because there were seven billion people in the world and the chances of finding your soul mate, if he even so happened to live in the twenty-first century, was one-in-seven-billion and that wasn't enough.

So I, being the young novelist that I was, decided to do the only thing I could. I wrote a story.

I gave TGND a name and a grown-up figure. I painstakingly hand-crafted a new world in which Arthur and Francis do find each other and do get a happy ending. I thought about writing a whole series. In the sequel, Francis is actually a ladybug and Arthur works for pest control, but they end up happily together anyway. In the sequel after that, Francis is the boy soldier in World War II and Arthur is a female commander. They end up happily together in that one as well. And I'd always write these stories from Francis' point of view, because that way I'd get to know him intrinsically. I liked that idea.

But then I realized that the story was, undoubtedly, unrealistic.

Ladybugs and workers-for-pest-control do not fall in love. Fifteen year old army boys and thirty year old commanders who are too busy for a romantic interest can't have a proper ending together. In short, soul mates do not find each other.

But we can still create them ourselves.

So I rewrote the story. To pay for the one-in-seven-billion chance of meeting your soul mate, I gave Francis a deadly disease that becomes incurable. (Truthfully, only one in every hundred have HIV. But that's not important here). I made it so that Francis and Arthur were never meant to find each other in the first place because their soul mates are somewhere else, probably dead or a fetus or something. But they became and molded themselves into soul mates because of each other and the work they put into their relationships.

And then Francis, of course, had to die.

Why?

That, my dear reader, is a good question.

Because as I'm writing this right now, I still haven't yet met my Genius Next Door. And I don't think I'll wait around for him any longer. So to let go of the fantastical image I've created of him in my head, he has to die and Arthur can't follow him, so I can move on. It's time to give another person a chance, you know? Maybe we'll actually fall in love, or something. Buy a house together, adopt a couple cute kids. Maybe I'll love this new person so much that I'll forget Francis' name unless I open this book and read it.

But you know what? That's okay. We've become I. It's difficult to forget your first love (and nor do you have to), but not impossible to forgive his memory. My answer comes in the form of these words, through TGND's sufferings, through TGND's faults, through TGND's trials.

This, my friends, is not a sad ending, because I choose to walk away from it hopeful and happy. After all, you don't spend your entire life imagining TGND being there with you without learning something from him.

There's the answer again — right there!

Why?

You tell me.

Yours truly,

Arthur Kirkland.