7 O'Clock Friday Morning

 I gave him the last ½ ounce of Jack at 7 o’clock on Friday morning.  He had tried to kill himself with whiskey over the previous 6 days and when I got to him, he was at least 20 pounds lighter than the last time I had seen him a week earlier.   His face was gray – the ever-present roses in his cheeks gone – and his bright blue-green eyes were sunken into deep shadows and glazed over.  He had bruises on his arms and a cut on his face.  And there were odd, fist-shaped red roses on his stomach where he had punched himself repeatedly.

When he came to the doorway, a wraith, and said in a shaky, child-like voice, “Erica, will you help me?” I immediately rose from the sofa and followed him into his dark bedroom, sitting next to where he had stretched out on his unmade bed.  Out of love, I took the bottle away long enough to keep him from killing himself, slowly weaning him off the alcohol with small shots and sips throughout the night.  In between shots of Jack, his ever-changing emotions encompassed giggling at the thought of his upcoming reward of the next taste of whiskey and abject terror from whatever his detoxing brain was revealing to him.  At 24 years old, he had already lived a long life in which his true soul had been annihilated by those who should have loved him unconditionally.

When I first met him, just four months earlier, his shining façade had been full in place.  But like recognizes like and I knew the wounded boy in him immediately.  In months of talking while consuming frozen yogurt and pitas our strange friendship grew.  I wanted him to know that I saw his anger and his pain and that it was okay.  I grew to love him as if he were my son.  As if he were an old friend I had just met.  He liked to say, “I feel like I’ve known you all my life.”

It was a long night.  I held him when he cried, whispered to him when he was frightened, wiped his brow and held his hands like the small boy he was.  When he said he wanted to die, I told him I loved him very much and did not want him to die.  When he said he was worthless, I told him how precious he was to me.  When he said he was evil, I told him he was a beautiful child of God.  He asked why I was doing this for him, sitting up all night and talking to him and holding him and I said, “This is what people do when they love one another.”  And he said, “I have never been loved before.”

At 7 a.m. I entered the bedroom with the promised ½ ounce of whiskey.  “This is it.  This is the last one.  The bottle is gone,” I told him.  He took the shot glass from me and drank its contents greedily, his breakfast.