Comments Please (FINISHED)

heres the finished version of half a story i posted probably about thursday... thanks to the two people who commented on my story before, your positivity served as motivation to finish this... i still dont like it too much, but hey i finished something... anyway, this is the first story ive ever really written except for school papers and stuff, so if anyway has advice or critique, both are appreciated.... thanks

I really was alone before I had met her. I mean, I had my mom… my sister Kim was off in college and David had just gone back to Boston, but Jess was still living with us. I had my group of friends at school too, and knew some of the girls they hung out with on weekends, so I shouldn’t have felt so alone I guess, but I did. I had all these people around me, but I was totally removed from them all. It was like they all spoke French and I only knew Swahili – I could understand if they wanted me to eat or drink, but that was about the extent of it. I couldn’t communicate any sort of intelligence or emotion; I was alone in that sense of the word.
It was only a couple months after I had tried to kill myself, so it was an unusually depressive time, which is more or less what I attribute our relationship to. It was easily a more depressive time that when I had actually tried to kill myself, which most people think is a bit strange, but it’s logical if you think about it. When you want to kill yourself, it’s because you’re unhappy – hopeless about the future, a boyfriend left you, parents, disease … whatever. Then you actually try to kill yourself, and if you survive, that whole rush of support comes. Siblings come in from out of town to make sure you’re ok; friends visit the hospital especially for you. People actually seem to care about you.
But eventually the siblings return home, friends can’t come because they start track practice, and your back to the same state of mind you were in before you wanted to kill yourself; only it seems much worse when contrasted the support you just received from all those who you thought cared. You start to feel that even that support was as fake as your suicide attempt - that the only reason anyone came anyway was so they wouldn’t feel guilty about your death, so their Sunday’s would be fun and funeral free so they could go shopping and continue masturbating their own commercialism. It seems that your entire existence is more or less a matter of convenience to those who care about you the most.
Saying it now, hearing it aloud I guess, it seems excessively selfish that one would feel that they should kill themselves because they don’t have the full undivided attention of those around them, but that makes sense too. No one ever killed themselves for anyone else.
But when you look at that loneliness I felt at the time, you could more or less say our meeting was a Godsend – if you’re the type to believe in that sort of thing.

In the lazy, dull, lifeless suburb I live in, the only place you can find any beauty is in the perfect dark of 2 in the morning – the stillness, the stars, the year-round chill… I don’t know what, but it’s definitely beautiful. I’m usually outside then – especially in the spring and summer, when I’m in dire need of for some sort of solace from the disgusting brightness everyone else seems to fall in love with – but I’m not always smoking when I’m out there. I was this time though… another godsend maybe.
Anyway here I am in the backyard, smoking a fag, when I hear a sound behind me. At first I though it was Jess, coming out to yell at me for smoking again, but it was the sliding door of the house next door. I looked over in time to see her walk into the darkness of the back patio and try twice unsuccessfully to light a cigarette before she gets pissed off with it and throws it into my yard, only to notice me – or my cigarette, at least – in the darkness next door.
The first words I heard from her, in a particularly irritated tone, were “What the **** are you doing there?” Seeing me stammering about in confusion for an answer – partly because I had no idea what the **** I was doing here, and partly because who the **** was she to demand an answer from me – she began laughing. “I mean why aren’t you coming the **** over her to light my cigarette?”
And that’s how we met.

I guess you could say she lied from the start, but that’s not entirely accurate. She lied in the same way I did when I told people I went to the hospital for an accident; I made it sound more like a car accident than a realizing I couldn’t kill myself halfway through hacking open some veins accident.
She told me that she had come to town to check into rehab and was staying with her aunt while she tried to change some habits. In her defense, it was I who assumed, under no permissible grounds, she meant rehab for alcoholism; in my defense, she was the one who brought up the fact that she was trying to stop drinking while she was here.
The next nights, we stayed together much longer, but that first night I was only with her for a good ten minutes, if even that. But it didn’t matter. As soon as I got back inside, I realized I was too lonely to do anything but fall in love with her – though it took a sleepless night mulling over our encounter to realize it. I also realized that she’d be at some rehab clinic all day, and probably under unblinking watch as soon as she got home, and the only time I’d be able to see her would be at 2 am. The first thing I did the next morning was to go to the gas station and buy a pack of cigarettes in preparation for that night.
That was the only time I ever saw her, at night. That’s one of the things that made our time together so beautiful – our shared isolation, admiration of the cosmos, and harsh critique of life on those perfect nights. The two hours between 2 and 4 was all that I needed from her though. She wasn’t a therapist getting paid to care, she wasn’t a friend or family member who felt obliged to give a ****… she was just as ****ed up and depressed in her life as I was in mine. I didn’t have to go into total depth on a subject I want to forget about for her to understand me. I didn’t have to say anything at all.
In fact, most of the time, I didn’t. Probably about 90% of our time together was just me listening to her absurd arguments about how human evolution was a curse, because at least monkeys live in peace, or her idealistic beliefs of the battles of the dualistic cosmic forces of good and evil which take place constantly in the universe and henceforth explain why this complex world that could only be totally explained if you add the variable of a supreme being seems totally devoid of its attention, or her claim that Rudyard Kipling was the biggest ******* in world literature, even if he did create The Jungle Book – my all-time favorite rant of hers. Yet it was in listening to all these ideas of hers that I could remove myself from that depressive, self destructive state and for the first time in God knows how long begin to concede to the even most minute form of happiness. And in the end, I guess that small solstice I got made it worthwhile.

It was insane how it all came about though. So suddenly, so strangely that I still can’t make the slightest bit of sense out of it at all. I guess the beginning of it was when she started shooting up again. That’s what she had come for in the first place, I found out – to go to rehab for heroin. It’s kinda funny how awful my idea of her being an alcoholic seemed at first, and how it seemed so minute when I found out what the reality of the situation was.
I noticed one night when she was lighting a cigarette… and it’s a miracle I didn’t notice any of the nights before. This big ****ing black and blue track right on the right angle of her elbow – so bold and gruesome it made me grimace. Still though, there was something odd about it… the way it stuck out so boldly even in the night that would better serve to camouflage it. Even after she had put out the lighter and even the cigarette I could see it plainly through the blanking darkness. Of all my previous experience with heroin addicts – really only from pictures and books I guess, but still – I had never seen or heard of a track that was more than the size of a quarter maybe. Her bruise flowed freely through her arm, looking more like a victim of a brown recluse spider whose arm was about to fall completely off. At first I paid absolutely no mind to it… I figured she had never learned to stab herself properly, and I was never able ask her anything about it. I was never able to bring up the subject of her drug use of heroin at all. She knew I noticed her arm and that I knew what it was… but neither of us was able to approach the subject at all, as if it were total taboo.
Still, thinking back on it, maybe I saw something I wanted to see in that bruised and scarred arm of hers… maybe I saw something I needed to see. What I’ve never been able to figure out is where she even got it from. She knew no one outside of her aunt and me in the entire city; she’d never been here before in her life.
Things started to go downhill after her relapse, if you couldn’t have guessed they would have. Not between us at all – I still needed to love her, and whatever mysterious feelings she had about me were unchanged. She was clearly getting sick though. She would come out a late by hour or more than when we usually met, her passionate rants I loved turned into incoherent mono-toned monologues halfway through when she ran out of either the strength or the will to care about what she said. She was fading, to put most simply.

It was only about a week or so after she had relapsed that she OD’d. She stumbled out at four in the morning with a needle still plunged into her vein, and a watery white vomit dripping out of her mouth, mumbling something incoherent. Her eyes would roll back into her head, and then come back and focus on me, like it was the only way she could ask me to help her. I was numb to the whole thing.
That was the scary part – the way I was so removed from her when I saw her like that. It was as if I was watching a movie before my eyes as opposed to watching this girl that had sheltered me from my own despair and pain, this girl I had come to love so easily struggle for her life. She fell to the ground, stared right into my eyes one last time, and managed to mumble something completely incoherent before she started seizing.
It was hearing her voice so distorted that brought me back. As soon as I heard it, all that rage that she had managed to shield me from hit me like a brick in the stomach, and I started banging on the door for help. I began shouting furiously into the night. I cursed her for ****ing dieing like this, I cursed myself for not ****ing knowing what to do, I cursed God for not ****ing helping her when she needed him most, and I cursed everyone who had ever told me about God for telling me he would. I shouted at nothing while she lay hopeless until my lungs ran out and I keeled over beside her, and took the needle out like I should’ve done as soon as I saw it. Like I should have done when I saw her scarred arm.

When I heard the sirens I started running towards them with the last of my energy. ‘She’s dying and this is your last chance to help her… screw being tired… DO SOMETHING’ went around over and over in my head as I ran the seemingly impossible distance of no more than a hundred feet from the back to the front yard. ‘Just get to the paramedics, let them take over from there. They’re professionals; they know exactly what to do in this exact situation. She’ll be fine. She won’t die here,’ I told myself, knowing in full consciousness that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. Knowing her chance of dying was far greater than living at this point. I gave myself a manufactured sense of security in what I told myself, as if without it I wouldn’t have been able to get to the ambulances in time.
There were no ambulances. They were police sirens from a patrol car coming down the street, right at me. ‘No matter,’ I told myself ‘Police always come with ambulances, they’re on their way, she’ll be fine…’ Screaming and cursing, tears of fury and fear streaking down my face I tried as best as possible to direct them to the backyard when they tackled me to the ground, pulling my hands behind my back and locking them there with cold metal handcuffs.
I struggled against them as long as I could, trying to convince them to go do something about the dying girl in the back, but eventually ran out of even the energy to shout and curse like I had been the past hour. While they were dragging me back, I saw her aunt, my neighbor. The neighbor who must’ve called the cops on the crazed teenager deliriously cursing and banging on her door at 4 in the morning when she should’ve been calling an ambulance. While they sat me in the car she came up and asked if I was ok, and began explaining that she had no idea what was going on when I woke her up with my screaming and that she thought someone was… when I cut her off in the middle when I finally caught enough breath to mutter out “YOUR NIECE IS DYING IN ON THE BACK PATIO!”
She stared at me like I was a madman. Like I was out of my mind on heroin myself. “What are you talking about?” she said… “I’m a single child… I’ve never been married, I don’t… I can’t even have a niece!”

They took me to the police station to give me a drug test, and questioned me about whether or not I was trying to break into her house and rob her and things like that. They kept me there all night, until they decided to just charge me with attempted breaking and entering. My mom and Jess both came by to pay the $100 bail, and my neighbor agreed to drop the charges under the condition that I saw a therapist for mental stress… a decision the three of them came to together, and one I readily accepted, before we went home.
Though they were all worried about my crazed idea of a dying girl in the back yard, they were relieved I hadn’t hurt myself at all again, and all went to bed when they got home, once they were sure I had calmed down. And I had… but I was far too confused and disturbed by the deal to go to bed.
Instead I went back outside one last time, with one last pack of cigarettes. Leaning up against the sliding door I had only yesterday nearly taken down, I smoked and tried to piece together all of what had just happened over the past few weeks. To be alone again in the night was an odd, but it was a familiar feeling, though now I was more confused than sad. I stayed up and reflected on it all through the old, comforting, darkness of the night, and when I hadn’t figured anything out by the first breaking of day, I finished my last cigarette, flicked it back into my yard, and went in to go to bed.

just to make sure no ones confused (people on this site seem pretty smart, but i dont want to be vague... i wrote the thing, so i know what im talking about, but i realize my ideas might not be so obvious to others) the whole relation was something he created to get through a hard time... kinda a metaphysical thingy so to speak... if this isnt clear, advice on how to make it so would be appreciated as well, thanks