I was just barely fifteen years old. I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t drive. I could barely navigate high school without getting lost. I didn’t even have a job yet. I didn’t know how to file taxes or manage finances or take care of a family. I had never even taken care of a pet.
So how on earth was I supposed to take care of a person?
The months blur together, months when life became precarious, but there are a few moments that I will always see in jarring clarity.
It began as a normal day, or as normal as life can be when you wake up wondering if your best friend made it through the night. Then suddenly it wasn’t. I remember how solid the paper felt in my hands. I remember how he refused to meet my eyes as he handed it to me. “Brian…what is this?” By then, months into what I now know was his complete depression, I wasn’t naive enough—anymore— to expect an answer. Especially not an answer that I’d want to hear.
“Just read it.” My fingers shook as I unfolded the crisp edges, the perfect thirds. It’s funny what details you remember, latching onto the safe and the familiar. The predictable. The letter was a lesson, a “final lesson in moral philosophy.” Aristotle’s virtue ethics say that you ought to choose the middle of the road, the compromise. He wrote, “It’s not good to not care, but maybe it is also possible to care too much. Sometimes, things simply aren’t worth caring about.” He meant that he wasn’t worth caring about. I remember every word, every letter. I remember staring at the pretty handwriting: the curl at the end of his g’s, the way his n’s sloped down sharply. I remember trying to memorize my best friend out of his words, hating myself for even wondering if this was all that would be left.
I remember choking, cracking, crumbling. I’d always wanted for something to happen, something grand and dramatic that put my life alongside my favorite novels’ heroines', but I forgot that everyone warns characters to be careful of what they wish for. I guess they’re right because it was one thing to lose myself in someone else’s terrifying story, to let someone else’s words create worlds of choking fears and paralyzing sadnesses, but another thing entirely when my life was the one falling apart. I don’t think I really understood that I couldn’t close the book when it was my story that I was trying to put away or that happy endings aren’t guaranteed in reality.
I remember starting my own letter, hunched over in the corner of a classroom. It was first period, accelerated biology. We were watching a movie, but I don’t remember what about. It was hard to see past a screen of tears and I wouldn’t have cared anyways. Why struggle to understand the science of life when I was already struggling to simply hold onto the pieces of my life that I already understood? I do, however, remember my own words. You asked me if I would hate you if you left. I finally figured out my answer. No, Brian, I wouldn’t hate you…I’d hate myself even more. The pieces were slipping out of my hands and there was nothing I could do. I had held on so long that my fingers had lost feeling, until I couldn’t tell how much longer they could hold their frozen grip.
Once I dropped the pieces? Once they fell?
I knew they would break.
And I was so…so tired of holding on.
I had never begged before, but I lost track that day of how many times I said “Please.” Maybe I thought that if I said it enough times, in enough different ways, he’d finally hear. If I was loud enough, quiet enough, strong enough, sure enough, kind enough, understanding enough, empathetic enough, gentle enough… If my words were good enough—if I was good enough—he would hear me. Maybe he’d even listen.
I’m not a religious person either, but that day, I thought maybe if I prayed to just the right god, or maybe to all of them all at once, somewhere out there, someone would be real. Someone, something, some great being… surely at least one of the great powers existed. Surely someone would take pity on him—on me. I was fifteen and I was begging the universe for a miracle.
People beg for miracles all the time. People die all the time. It’s hard enough to fight to save them when they’re fighting too. Someone who’s touch-and-go is on the edge. It’s when the outcome hangs in the balance, when a life is tipped at the apex of a scale, ready to tip either way. The best doctors, best medicines, best chances—none of that can guarantee a good outcome. There are always risks. There are always deaths. Life is too fragile, too precarious. And if all of the people who want to live can’t be saved, how could a freshman girl—still coltish and scared in a grown-up world—save someone who didn’t want to live? How was I supposed to force the scale to the right side when he was trying to walk off the other end?
How much longer was I supposed to hold on? How much longer before my fingers, already numb and tired, faltered? Once something breaks, blind luck is needed to find all of the pieces again, to find each of the smashed shards and reconstruct a shaky past. Only a miracle will return things to the way they once were. I wasn’t a miracle, but I desperately wanted to be. I kept trying, kept looking for pieces that were ground to dust. I kept hoping that my clumsy fingers could hold the whole damn mess together, at least until the next fall. I made myself do it, over and over and over—
What other choice was there? I remember spending nights grasping at straws in conversations filled with an optimism I didn’t—couldn’t—believe in. I remember refusing sleep until getting a promise of another morning. I remember counting the seconds after sending a simple “good morning” text, willing for there to be a reply, for there to be a person still there who could.
What I don’t remember is destroying myself to save him. I don’t remember how I lost the friends who would make me laugh, or the diligent perfectionism I prized so highly, or even the ability to focus for more than a few minutes on school or anything else. I don’t remember why I collapsed sobbing at lunch or how that ended in my friends forcing me to talk to a school counselor. I don’t remember how I fell apart or when it started happening or even when I realized who I’d become. I was trying so hard to keep my fingers clenched tightly shut that I didn’t realize they too were breaking. Ignore a fracture, even a tiny fissure, for long enough and it becomes unfixable. In fact, the web of cracks spreads until it doesn’t matter where it came from or when or how or why.

I’m broken.