Almost. I didn’t quite yet have the heart to read to the end.

SPOILERS. BEWARE.

THERE’S SPOILERS AFOOT.

STUPID SPOILERS.

YOU REALLY DON’T WANT THESE SPOILERS

OH YOU READ THE BOOK ALREADY? PERFECT.

IT BEGINS:

The book is absolutely horrid. It’s completely unfair. But that precisely, is what it is about: life itself. Life is no wish-granting factory, and neither is this book. It leaves you hungering for Hazel’s great tragedy, preparing for her to be the “grenade” of it all, and then then He grenades you. Right when you least expect it. And you’ve fallen in love with Augustus, so you’re blind to his detonation, blind to the possibility of losing him, and then he blows up right in your face and you cry for hours. 

I then went to sleep expecting dreams of holding Augustus close, but I went through a night of confusion, of loneliness. I went through dreams of doubting my friends and screaming at them for treating me like a second-hand friend. Of desperately seeking beaches but never finding them. Of fucking up onstage, breaking set pieces in the show, and being ridiculed by everyone. Of feeling completely alone, like no one understood me. Of finding my own cat lost and cold in San Francisco, and not even he would allow me to save him. Then I woke up feeling alone still. The boy next to me in bed would never understand my greatest devastations, my longing since reading this book.

I longed for Augustus’s life back, for a happy ending or at least a prepared-for and expected one with a dead Hazel and Trooper Augustus. But aside from that, this boy of mine would never understand me, my filter towards the world, my filter perceiving the book, the loneliness felt by me, my personal desperations. Because no one could. Neither would my mother, since she is so bubbly, my roommates, my teachers, my own peers. The only one who would - would be my own Augustus, if I ever find one. What if I come to love a Grenade? Pets are Grenades, as they live only ten years.

What made me saddest was the drawn-out preparation of His death. Wait, no. My grandma went through this kind of death as well, a horribly long process before dying, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as what I read because her death was expected. And she had already lived a long and happy life.

What really made me saddest was the sheer unexpectedness, of his and her stars becoming equally crossed instead of unequally crossed (unequally crossed was already sad, if not sadder.)

Wait, no. Augustus’s star becamemore crossed than Hazel’s. Had their stars been equally crossed, they would have died together in peace. And the shock of this happening to him was too much to handle, since I had come to love him. Before he got sick again, I found myself mindlessly drawing him. Writing his name in joking ways in Facebook comments, dropping it in conversation, using him as an adjective even. But that was when he was alive, well, and sexy. Then he became a monster, and then dead, and then taboo. Instantly.

And there’s nothing you can do about the world’s connotation of the dead and of the dying, the dying so much scarier than the dead, with their vomit and tubes and such, and the dead leaving you horrendously affected. Leaving you to feel responsible in some way. Leaving your ambitions to relate to theirs. 

The thing about childhood is blissful ignorance. The thing about teen angst is sudden contemplation. The thing about adult life is thinking you know all the answers, but you never really do. And the thing about acquiring wisdom is knowing that you don’t know.

The thing about Augustus Waters is that he will keep singing his note, it’s just his note is silent now.

The thought of him being left alone again was just plain awful. The reality of him leaving everyone else alone… well. Again, it would have been okay had it happened the way we expected. He himself even said he wouldn’t have minded having his heart broken by her absence. And he had already been abandoned on earth by someone he loved. He was prepared. And she was prepared to die. But no one expected the alternative, the flip side. No one. No. One. That’s the thing about life. No one expected it. Not me. Not his parents or hers. Not him. Not her. No. One.