15-05-2021-052358It-Ends-with-Us

It was probably no later than ten o’clock when he got there, but we talked so
much, I remember it was after midnight the next time I looked at the clock. I
can’t even remember what all we talked about, but I do remember how I felt. He
seemed so happy and there was a light in his eyes that I’d never seen there
before. Like he’d finally found his home.
He said he wanted to tell me something and his voice grew serious. He
readjusted me so that I was straddling his lap, because he wanted me to look
him in the eyes when he told me. I was thinking maybe he was about to tell me
he had a girlfriend or that he was leaving even sooner for the military. But
what he said next shocked me.
He said the first night he went to that old house, he wasn’t there because he
needed a place to stay.
He went there to kill himself.
My hands went up to my mouth because I had no idea things had gotten
that bad for him. So bad that he didn’t even want to live anymore.
“I hope you never know what it’s like to feel that lonely, Lily,” he said.
He went on to tell me that the first night he was at that house, he was
sitting in the living room floor with a razor blade to his wrist. Right when he
was about to use it, my bedroom light went on. “You were standing there like
an angel, backlit by the light of heaven,” he said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off
you.”
He watched me walk around my bedroom for a while. Watched me lie on the
bed and write in my journal. And he put down the razor blade because he said
it’d been a month since life had given him any sort of feeling at all, and
looking at me gave him a little bit of feeling. Enough to not be numb enough to
end things that night.
Then a day or two later is when I took him the food and set it on his back
porch. I guess you already know the rest of that story.
“You saved my life, Lily,” he said to me. “And you weren’t even trying.”
He leaned forward and kissed that spot between my shoulder and my neck
that he always kisses. I liked that he did it again. I don’t like much about my
body, but that spot on my collarbone has become my favorite part of me.
He took my hands in his and told me he was leaving sooner than he
planned for the military, but that he couldn’t leave without telling me thank
you. He told me he’d be gone for four years and that the last thing he wanted
for me was to be a sixteen-year-old girl not living my life because of a boyfriend
I never got to see or hear from.