Four in the Morning
Most of my time should go to making money for the lean times, eating, sleeping, getting around—whatever normal people do. Instead I’m telling my friends they shouldn’t kill themselves.
I’m almost thirty. That’s a lot of years. But I’ve never had this many people around me dealing with depression all at once. Burnout. Broken hearts. Existential panic. Fear of the future. Voices. Regret. ADHD. Everyone’s got something, and they want to tell me about it for hours, and then eventually it always comes: I wish I were dead.
You’re standing there and you can’t say what you’re thinking. Not at first, anyway.
Early on you make jokes. You give advice that sounds clever so they know you care, but also this isn’t an emergency. You’re not spending the next week in an ice cream shop crying together. But if the talking doesn’t stop, you grab them, sit down, and work through what’s actually broken. Your girlfriend left you? Yeah, that’s shit. We all go through it. And however deep this pain feels right now, it ends. She was garbage anyway.
No money? Okay, let’s figure out what you can actually do right here in this city. Who do we know. Who can help. How fast can you get a job that doesn’t completely suck. One step at a time. Your whole life’s fallen apart and you haven’t slept with anyone in three years? Wine first. Then the real drinking.
What comes out of these conversations is always the same thing: nobody’s life works the way they want it to. We all hit a moment where we think about just stopping. But you have to let that thought pass, make room for the next thing, something that actually fixes it. We can figure this out together.
You hug. You say stupid stuff again. The moment is over. Seems like it, anyway. Then it’s four in the morning and a Facebook message shows up. I wish I were dead.
And you close the laptop and think, okay then do it. Just leave me out of this.
I understand your life isn’t what you wanted. I get that you’re crushed. That’s your thing, honestly. But we’re your friends, so we show up. We listen. We look at it clear. We pull you out of the wreckage. We do your thinking for you. For free. Or a beer. Or a date with your good-looking sister—the hot one, not the other. But then you actually have to get your life together instead of just rolling around in self-pity and convincing us nothing works. You actually have to do the work. Let me go back to living. Making money. Eating. Sleeping. Moving around. Being a normal person.