“Invisible things are the only realities.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
I grew up as a writer and reader during the memoir and personal essay boom, which means I’ve read a lot about love— first love, dangerous love, Modern Love, who a person should love the most, when to walk away. I’ve been married for almost a decade, and I’ve read essays that tell me I’m lucky or blessed; that we must work hard on our love; that we’ve just convinced ourselves we’re happy; even that there are checklists of “just ten things a day” that ensure we won’t ever leave each other. That we’ll stay “we.”
For some reason, I enjoy those essays and listicles despite my marriage being light years away from a checklist. When I chose my husband, that was it. I am ruthlessly monogamous, and I have been since I started dating. I dated my first boyfriend for close to five years. My husband, Andy, is made of similar stock, and had a lot of years in a “five ways to honor your partner’s love language” relationship to show for it. Which is why, in some ways, I have to remind myself over and over again that it isn’t my fault I met Spencer first. It’s not my fault he’s been around for as long as I can remember.
And my beautiful, thoughtful husband listens to me mourn that in just a few weeks, Spencer is leaving me.
“I don’t know exactly how much time we have left together,” I said the other night while we were putting clean sheets on the bed. “I’m afraid to look.”
Ever-patient, Andy said, “Do you want me to Google it?”
I thought for a minute. “Maybe later.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know just how soon he’d be gone. I’ve hidden from everything that might tell me more than I want to know, and my friends know better than to bring it up. When I love, I love hard.
I held the stubborn corner of the fitted sheet, the one that always pops off because I keep books and candy and letters between my mattress and nightstand and the wall, while Andy anchored the other three corners. It’s a mess, but I think of them as things I might need in the dark— a taste of something to ground me in the real world, words people I love have written to me. There’s nothing there from Spencer, which makes sense. It would be ridiculous for me to have something from someone who doesn’t exist.
Just because he doesn’t exist doesn’t make him less important. In fact, his being fictional, in some ways, makes our relationship less about facts, more about the instinct in the way light shoots from the television to my optic nerve, turns something upside down and then back right side up, and somehow still echoes once the machine has powered down.
When I was in high school, my mom saw me elevate my academic goals above everything else in my life. I would stay up all night to make sure I made a paper deadline or I’d make sure I had my Academic Decathlon materials copied down in the tiniest handwriting possible so I could study on the bus. She knew that a huge part of me was my Texan competitiveness, and even though she knew it wasn’t healthy, she understood a huge part of my self-worth and identity was formed because I judged myself based on perceived intellect: sure, I could compare Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but could I find a way to envision translating the three different types of writing to cinema and discuss how that changed things? It was like every synapse in my body was constantly firing, and I knew it wouldn’t keep that speed up forever. I had to work as hard as possible for as long as possible.
My mother, who is a smart and practical woman, didn’t care about the day-to-day work. But she also knew I did. Instead of telling me I needed to stop worrying myself (which I would have taken as a challenge), Mom made one rule that I had to follow through with every day.
One hour of TV. Every. Day.
Don’t get me wrong. I love TV. I throw an Adam Sandler party for my creative writing students every December. I still watch The Simpsons and SNL and I’m aware that it’s 2020. I told you I was dedicated and loyal. I decide what I love, and then I love it, sometimes past a point of logic. (I seriously just gave up arguing that Kanye’s College Dropout was good enough to erase how ridiculous he is now… well, it was months and not years ago. And in fact, since the writing of this essay, I caught myself making the argument again.)
Twenty years ago, watching an hour of TV a night felt almost itchy, like something that would ensure I wouldn’t succeed, I wouldn’t get into college, I’d never have a career I loved— but then, fifteen years ago, after the habit was already formed, there he was.
Dr. Spencer Reid (and yes, I use the honorific: he worked hard for it), “boy wonder” and youngest profiler at the FBI, is technically trademark of Criminal Minds, which, though you’ll often find me arguing it is not a traditional procedural, very much is. I understand that— but I also understand that the human brain is capable of processing duality and that I can both think my show and my character are better and more important while knowing that people feel the same way about their shows. To me, the difference between Criminal Minds and a show like Law & Order: SVU is simple. Dr. Reid was, in some ways, my first love. (He is played by a man who actually does exist named Matthew Gray Gubler; Gubler, however, is also a director, writer, and children’s book author, and he lives in a tree house, so I forgive you if you don’t believe he is real, either. He and I have never met, which is good: it would almost certainly challenge my cognitive dissonance.) Spencer was fascinating: eidetic memory, too smart for his own good, specialist at everything and yet somehow able to chase the bad guys and make the arrest— and focused exclusively on his work, books, and philosophy. It was like looking in an aspirational mirror. I was in love with the idea that there could be someone out there like him: someone for whom those hours studying weren’t wasted. I was in love with the idea that I could be someone like him.
Once I met him? Of course I could make an hour a week to celebrate Dr. Reid and his gifts: the way he remembers Dostoevsky, mathematical theorems, and entire books of the Bible at the same time seems impossible, sure, but this world wasn’t built in possibility. This world is mine, like if the Taj Mahal was a library for the living, made solely of knowledge and trivia. I would be, of course, Dr. Reid’s favorite “IRL” girlfriend. Here, in this time I carved out, we rule benevolently, his love for me as strong as mine for him.
That’s the scary part, isn’t it? Because if I met the actor who plays this character, there’d be no love involved at all.
As it is, maybe someone fictional is the only way to balance out all the love I feel like I need to give on a daily basis, an amount that would be exhausting, otherwise. Who would be able to tolerate me, so anxious to tell people I love them that I often start by saying, “You don’t have to say this back to me…”
Dr. Reid— Spencer— was born in 2005 as a fully-formed FBI agent who had started college in his early teens. In college, I was still laminating study questions so I could work in the shower, but I was doing it in part because I now had a cadre of shows I liked to watch a week: Criminal Minds, Law & Order: CI (Vincent D’Onofrio, to be clear, was never my TV boyfriend: he was more like a TV older brother), and Veronica Mars, whose titular character was sometimes painfully familiar to me. But it was Criminal Minds that my mom and I sometimes watched long-distance, me in Evansville, Indiana where I was in school, her in Garland, Texas, where I’m from.
We switched hometowns: she’s from southern Indiana. I know from this side of the gold Nokia cell phone how hard it was for me to be away and know the topography of her life, but not get to be physically with her. Now that my stepdaughter, Grace, is fifteen, I am starting to get glimpses of my mom’s side of the call. It’s much scarier than my side was. I called Mom every day, and every week, we’d discuss Criminal Minds. Not because we had to come up with something to talk about. Mom and I have always had easy conversation. But at the time, I’d already been dating the same person for almost three years, and there wasn’t much to tell— so instead, we’d talk about intrigue and mysteries and I would, as always, reiterate that I was just glad that Spencer had made it home safe, even when worse for the wear. We talked about Spencer like he was real. In some ways, the world he inhabited was more real than the one I did, suddenly thrust into a Midwestern snow globe, no mariachi static on blank radio dials, no different languages being spoken at the super market, no “Little Vietnam.” Indiana felt flat, like a one dimensional setting, but cold. When I came to a fictional place (and come on, admit it: you aren’t sure that Indiana is real. If you’ve never lived here, it’s faceless and hypothetical), I got to bring my fictions with me, and then my mom and I would talk about them. And then life was real again: my mom witnessed it, too, you know.
That was fifteen years ago. I’m still in Indiana, but I teach at the University of Evansville now. Mom’s still in Garland, just outside Dallas. I have a beautiful family and a life here: my husband, my stepdaughter, my friends, my students, my dogs. But no matter how many people I love, I’m gearing up for a loss: Dr. Spencer Reid is about to evaporate. By my calculations, I have six more weeks with him before he’s gone (into syndication) forever.
We have been together for fifteen years. He will leave, almost certainly, without saying what I would consider a proper goodbye.
A student named Case, who I work very closely with, recently asked me how I handled every May, watching people I poured my soul into walk away and disappear, not sure if I’d ever see them again. I was honest with him: it’s harder some years than others. There have been students who would have devastated me if they’d not kept in touch.
How is that any different? How is my love for students I know will leave me from the moment we meet any different from my love of something fictional? Because sometimes, I feel like the image gets trapped upside down in my head, and the relationship I have with my students is fictional— to them.
A few years ago, I was curled up in our bed while Andy made dinner and talked with my stepdaughter. I almost never leave the common area while she’s awake (and I’m including the night I had a stroke: once again, I commit), but Reid was in jail— for nearly a whole season. And it looked really bad, like maybe he really had murdered someone. I knew better. I’d seen him drugged more than once, dosed with medication that altered his perceptions. This had to be an eight or ten episode arc that was leading to that, I was so sure. Andy came back to the bedroom and poked his head in.
“I swear to God, if they don’t get him out of prison, I’m not going to watch this stupid show anymore,” I said.
He laughed. “And if they don’t stop with this drug plot line—“
I cut him off. “Why is it always Reid? Why do they always make him suffer?”
Andy said, “Because they know they have an audience of people like you, hanging on his every word, saying, ‘I swear to God…’” He probably smiled. Then he said, “I’ll keep dinner warm. You can come out when your TV boyfriend is out of jail.”
He wouldn’t be out of jail for several weeks (all the while, I cursed and said I was going to give them one more week before they lost me forever), though I eventually had dinner. I wondered out loud to Andy that night if I was this upset about a character I loved being wrongfully accused, what would I do if Andy had been accused of a crime he didn’t commit? “I’m afraid to find out,” he admitted.
Honestly? So am I. It would not go well for the other person. I’ve watched Spencer grow into himself, and I feel so fiercely protective of him, it’s like I’m a wolf, skulking around the writer’s room table, daring them to hurt him one more time. See what happens, I think. If it were Andy? I don’t know what I’d do with all that love.
Is it really the writer’s room? Of course not. But there is a part of me that only comes out at night, that encircles my family, that doesn’t just promise harm to anyone who hurts them, but who really means it. Some people have called me “loyal to a fault.” “Fault” doesn’t just turn into a positive thing because you put a nice adjective in front of it.
Andy understands that there is a younger part of me that is locked into this character, something naïve and almost smart enough to understand how big the world is, but not quite aware yet of how much of it I’ll never fully comprehend. He doesn’t watch it with me: he allows me to enjoy the world that doesn’t exist, even if it also throws a weird, true shadow in our universe.
Over the last several months, I blocked every word or search term that could accidentally “spoil” the end of the series for me. The second news came out that Criminal Minds wasn’t going to renew, I stopped following the actors on all social media. The last post from any of them was an ultrasound Matthew Gray Gubler posted. “This was my original screen test for Criminal Minds,” he said, or something similar. I can’t find it or vouch for it. Remember? I can’t research anything about Gubler. What if I accidentally learn something about how things are going to end for me and Dr. Reid? Time travel is dangerous: if you know how something is going to end, you might waste some of those last precious moments worrying about something inevitable.
A little over a year ago, I realized my student assistant, Charlie, was going to be leaving. I’d grown close with him: he’d been around during my recovery. I tried to spend most of our time left together in the moment, enjoying his company. Charlie had become a fixture: he’d come over for dinner and play guitar or fight about poetry. After my stroke, it felt like between Andy at the hospital and home, my doctors, and Charlie at school, I got put back together. Sometimes I imagined that there was a tiny version of myself in my head, unplugging wires that had been put back in wrong and reconnecting them to a better link, like an old telephone operator. But that last year, through every time Charlie and I would have coffee, through the trips to he took with Andy and me to New York, there was a low-key buzzing in the back of my head. This is the last time you’ll do this, a voice would say. And still, something else plugging and unplugging.
The last time he was able to come for a visit was one day this summer and as I was leaving the restaurant, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say. Finally I blurted out, “I don’t know how to miss you.”
I rarely get the words I want exactly right these days, but those were right. Because even though I knew his being around wasn’t protecting me, at least not physically, I hadn’t had to say goodbye to someone I was so close with since I left Texas.
You want to know a secret? I spent a lot of hours crying to Ben Folds’s “Still Fighting It,” even though few of the lyrics apply. I also spent a lot of time singing “Warning Sign” by Coldplay. “That’s your Charlie song,” Andy said eventually. “I don’t even know if you notice. You seem to sing it when you miss him.” Sometimes the song burns, so I know Andy is right, even though the words don’t make sense.
Now, I’m preparing to lose Spencer after fifteen years. And instead of counting the weeks, I should be grateful to know that Wednesday nights will be date night, at least for the rest of the season. I should be picking out our song. I hope I don’t have to learn a new way to miss a friend.
A few days ago, I was teaching a class and without thinking, said something careless: “The closer I get to ‘great,’ the more I want to be a ghost. If I have ever accomplished anything, it filters out through someone else.” I didn’t think much of it until I saw Juels, a student who knows me pretty well, writing it down.
“What?” I asked. Usually, I leave her alone. She’s someone who can listen fully and doodle, so I don’t always bug her when her pen is going. Some people think better with more noise. But this time, she laughed.
“That’s perfect,” she said. “That’s exactly how I’m going to describe you to people.”
I’ve gone back and forth: does she mean that she’ll tell people I’m invisible in my own stories? Or will she say that I tell people I am? The distinction is pretty important— not that I am paying close attention to how students describe me. (Talk about a way to drive yourself crazy.)
I didn’t stop to ask her what she meant. So what if I see myself as someone who helps push people to succeed, but does so quietly? What if I see my ideas and love as moments that have been distilled and are useful later when someone needs a burst of courage?
But what if I’m wrong? Because I’m happy with the first two outcomes, but if I’m erasing myself as a matter of habit and to no one’s benefit? That scares me. I wonder what wire the telephone operator in my brain crossed.
But that’s not the point here, right? We’re talking about TV boyfriends. Playing invisible is actually a good strategy. He can never really fall for you, you know. You’re not real to him, either. He’s a character, falling in love with whoever the writers want him to. It will never be you. (But the people the writers invent for him… they aren’t real, either. Why couldn’t it be you?) There is no way to answer any of these questions.
You can’t keep your TV boyfriend forever. They all eventually get killed off or sent to syndication purgatory. I could watch old episodes, but it’s not the same. I don’t want to have the same conversation with my husband every single night— why would I watch a re-run of a TV show that I paid close attention to the first time?
These days, my mom and I don’t talk about Criminal Minds. I’m 34. We talk about my kid and my job. Few of my students watch the show. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I’m the only person who still watches as manically as I do, waiting for Wednesday night all week. And then after I watch the show, Andy asks me what happened, and I tell him. There’s a part of me that has been watching and examining this character for so long, it’s impossible to turn the impulse off. Like real love, sometimes it’s reignited with a simple thing, like the way Dr. Reid tucks his hair behind his ear absently. Sometimes it’s like an explosion: he recently became the first person from the Behavioral Analysis Unit to make a perfect score on his firing range test, and to have him branch out and learn other ways of being excellent felt important.
Sometimes, though, I think my love for Spencer— and I do believe I’d call him Spencer, at least at home— is the reverse of what I told the class represents success for me. When I love someone, I quietly try to love them into their best selves, and then when they accomplish that, I celebrate for them. But Spencer— he’s alive because I’ve helped make him alive. His successes are real because I tell my husband about them, and then we talk about why or how the show is made better because of him. I will never be onscreen. I’m not a character.
For fifteen years, he hasn’t been a character to me, either. He’s brought me closer to people I love and taught me more about the way I treat and view loyalty and devotion than makes sense. Like a first love, I know we don’t have much in common anymore and I can feel him slipping away— but he’ll have always been there. Sometimes I’ll look down at my Converse and suit pants and think of him, and for a moment, it’s like the whole thing was real, even though I don’t know what Spencer smells like or does when he’s bored: I don’t know the way he’d sit on our couches or play with the dogs. His absence in my space doesn’t make the relationship we had less powerful, though. It’s said that you only stay in relationships if you are getting something you need from them. At some point in time, I needed Dr. Reid to love some invisible version of myself. I hope I can fill in the colors and the space now that he’s disappearing. I hope he has taught me how to slowly appear.
If you’ve seen the show, you know it begins and ends with a quotation. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be:
“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
— A. A. Milne
Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020. She has a column forthcoming with Hobart.