Helium

One thing I’ll always remember about you is the way you walked with me. The way the hills rolled around, the way the deep violets of the grass melted away beneath the sun, the softness of your breath as I looked at you and the way you looked at me as you said, Oh, I thought we were just going to do the appreciate-nature-in-silence thing, and how that made me laugh, how the whiteness of your teeth clipped through the muted shadows of the morning, how I never seemed to spend enough time with you.

I went to a party later that week. They called it a “youth group get-together”, but that just means a party of the shitty assortment where teenagers play tag for thirty minutes before staring at screens for the rest of the day. Marian even brought some borax and some glue to make slime. They had fun, I guess. It was the sort of party I might have enjoyed when I was in middle school. But I had other things on my mind.

Please don’t die.

I know it’s a selfish thing to say. You, live for me? Endure the crushing weight of life, for me? Don’t laugh. And you thought you were selfish.

Don’t die. I don’t care about the weight of it. I care about the absence. The nothingness. I don’t want to wake up to the flimsy paper-words of an email, flat, lifeless, the end of a life reduced to nothing but pixels and a subject line, zebra stripes of black and white seared into my memory. At least let me hear your voice one last time. At least let me struggle.

I think it’s ridiculous that we’ve got these fucking Christians waving around their Meaning of Life as if it were nothing more than a badge of honor when we’ve got people like you, wondering, searching, hungering for purpose, something that will last, something to give life meaning, anything to cure your lust for death.

Every moment I wonder, you know? I see the blushing trees and I think of you. I hear others laugh and I think of you. Sometimes I’ll just wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and look at the time before scrambling for my phone in panic, wondering, wondering, wondering before rolling back into the blankets and sighing in relief, phone still in hand, staring at those frozen images of you still alive, trying to memorize every smile, every curve, every blemish before my mind begins to wander and I am haunted yet again by visions of your corpse, limp, rotting away in a plastic bag as if you were some forgotten grocery meat.

I love you so, so much. I wish you knew that, and I wish that were enough to save you. And though I know it isn’t, still I will hope.