untitled

It’s always some obscene hour of the night when the call comes. Sometimes there are words, sometimes he speaks, not necessarily to you, but you hear his voice and you can breathe a sigh of relief for the little victory that he’s conscious. Sometimes he doesn’t say anything; all you can hear is the background noise, the breathing and sometimes the music. Sometimes it’s silence, the painful gritty phone silence, and you wait for him to speak but nothing comes. Those are the worst nights.
You always end up driving around the empty streets in circles around the city, spiralling in closer and closer to downtown, trying to look in an orderly fashion. You’ve checked all the usual places and he’s nowhere to be found and now every run-down motel you pass, every grimy apartment building, hell, even alleys, you’re looking, you’re wondering. Somewhere, he’s out there somewhere, somewhere there’s a boy with tattooed arms and greasy hair and deep blue bags under his deep blue eyes and he’s laying limp somewhere, and all you can do is search for him and hope there’s a pillow under his head.
And you’re scared because you don’t know if he’s dead or alive, and you’re angry because you don’t know why he has to do this to himself and to you, and you wish he’d called somebody else just this once because you haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep since you met him. But you don’t know if anyone else would do this, if anyone else would drive around looking for him. Everyone else has given up and every night, every time, you wonder if you should give up too.
You’ve spent entire nights like this, from two a.m. till the sun comes up, just driving circles, searching everywhere, once, twice, three times, all the usual spots, all his usual haunts—because that’s all he does anymore, he haunts, with his skinny pale face and his long limbs. And you tell yourself, this time, this is the last time. After this time he will be on his own. This is the last night you will be circling the drain looking for him.
And then you find him. It doesn’t matter where you find him, or how. Sometimes he’ll call and say where he is, sometimes one of his friends will call, once in a blue moon you just get lucky and there he is. He’s showed up on your doorstep before. Just as the sun starts rising on a cold clear morning and you’re sitting on the hallway floor with your head in your hands, sure he’s dead or close to it, he’s there, announcing his return with a half-hearted knock if he can even manage that. You’ve found him slumped on the porch before, not even able to muster the strength to walk the rest of the way in.
But you find him, or he finds you. And every time you sit there with him collapsed against you smelling like desperation and tainted sweat. His tired eyes flutter closed and his head rests in your lap and you stroke his hair and you cry. You never cry until after you found him, after you know he’s safe, or as safe as he’ll be. You’re careful to be quiet so your tears don’t wake him. You stroke his hair and you cry for a while.
The worst part, the absolute worst part, is when he opens his eyes and looks up at you and he sees that you’ve been crying again. His face just crumples and he looks so pitiful—not that he didn’t look pitiful enough already—and he knows he’s let you down but there’s nothing he can do anymore. There’s a moment, every time, where you just look at each other and not a word is said. And no matter what promises you’ve made to yourself, the next time you fumble for the phone in the dark, you’ll get out of bed and you’ll find him. You’ll pick up his pieces, every time, until it kills you, or him, whichever comes first.