My cousin, Eli

When my cousin, Eli, killed himself it said in the newspaper that he was a young man taken in the prime of his life. When his best friend, Isaac, and I saw it, all Isaac could do was scoff. If that was the prime of Eli’s life, Isaac said, then it hadn’t been much of a life, and even though the remark bit, I had to say that I agreed with him. And after that the same resentment for Eli that had already grown in Isaac began to grow inside of me. 

     Despite all of that though, all of the anger I harbored for my deceased cousin, there I sat, four years later, in my car with a boy who was just like him. His name was Ezra and we worked together. Really he wasn’t a boy, he was thirty two, but the way he was looking at me, with such a raw pain in his eyes, I couldn’t help being reminded of a child. All I wanted to do was take him into my arms then, but I knew that there was really nothing I could do for him. That fact had nagged at the back of my mind as I drove and he talked, and I wondered why, knowing what I did about people like him, that I bothered to get involved. I guess I thought that maybe if I let him talk, tried to show him that someone cared, he might remember that the next time he went to pop another pill, but I doubted it. What I was really doing though was using him. His problems were a temporary escape from my own, and, later, when I was laying in bed with tears streaming for reasons that I didn’t want to face, I could lie to myself and say it was because I was worried about him. There was also a part of me that looked him in the face and saw the same blood shot, bright blue eyes that Eli once had, staring back at me. 

     Ezra and I kissed once and I freaked out. I couldn’t stand to have him touching me, but not because I didn’t want him to. I had wanted him to touch me like that for a long time, but when he cradled the back of my head, when he cupped my cheek in his palm, his hands burned my skin. Before I knew it, I was crying and he was apologizing, but all I could do was tell him to get out of my car. Later I texted him to explain myself, although I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth. I said that I was too stressed, that I was too on edge, that I had wanted him to kiss me, but I hadn’t been ready for it. All of it was a lie, but that was better than the alternative. After that he took great pains with me. We talked, like we normally did, joked and teased each other like every other day before, but he kept his distance. 

     Now, as we sat together in front of his house, neither of us making any moves to say good bye, I felt a growing need to tell him the real reason I had pushed him away like that, but I didn’t. Instead, I said, “What are you going to do?” 

     ”I don’t know,” he said, quietly. 

     ”I could get you some suboxone,” I offered, tentatively. I knew he would say yes, but I also knew that would come with a price. Getting the suboxone for Ezra could go three ways. Either I would get them and he wouldn’t take them, he wouldn’t get clean, and that would be that. Or it may have been that I got them and he did take them, but a month, or a year, or a day later he would relapse again and he would come back. That was a game I didn’t want to play. But it also could have been the case that I got them and he took them, and he didn’t go back. I didn’t know which result was worse. 

     I wanted him to get better, I swear I did, but that would mean I wouldn’t be able to pretend he was just like Eli. If he got better, that meant I wouldn’t be able to pretend that the worst was all that survived in people. If he got better, that would mean that the only one hiding would be me. 

     ”Would you?” he asked. “It would mean a lot to me.” 

     I told him that of course I would, I would be more than happy to. He smiled then, relief crossing his face, and he leaned forward like he was going to hug me but then thought better of it. 

     We said good night, then, and he got out of my car. I would have the suboxone for him on Tuesday, I said, and he thanked me, before closing the car door. 

       Isaac had questioned my relationship with Eli once, after Eli killed himself, and I had quickly shut him down. There was no point, I thought, in rehashing the past. What was done, was done, I told myself, refusing to admit that it was more complicated than that. But when I got home that night I contemplated calling him, even though we hadn’t spoken in years. I stared at his name on the screen of my phone for a very long time, wondering if he even had the same number anymore. After a while, I counted to three, pressed the call button, and let it ring.