No revelations that veer into the uncomfortably personal, no cries de coeur that are incandescent with self-loathing.
Over the past decade, I’ve made a series of new acquaintances: calm and pragmatic people who have reasonable conversations during which we weigh both sides and make a determination. Not sure whether he wanted to be saved or whether he remembered how rarely I checked voicemail, but the cops retrieved him from his parents’ garage nonetheless. I called cops in another state once, for a friend who left me a goodbye voicemail and then tried to hang himself. But it was the same with my friends: the phone calls late at night, trips to the ER, razors and guns and pills and nooses. I was a camp counselor for young teens for two of those summers, and that may have explained some of it: all the precocious kids away from home for the first time, imploding. The summer I turned eighteen, everybody I knew started trying to kill themselves and didn’t stop until we were all twenty-four or twenty-five.
The idea of keeping a child alive baffles me.
