It was late.
It was just me and this dark-haired girl
on the platform at the subway station
and she was crying.

She kept looking over,
and I kind of felt bad
despite everything.

“Hey….hi! Are you okay? Listen, it can’t be that bad.”
She laughed without humour. “This coming from you.”
“What?” I asked, taken aback.
“I’m not crying for me.” She lifted her head up. “I’m crying for you.”
“Wait…” I said, “what do you mean?”
She handed me a slip of paper. I, almost unconsciously, slipped it into my pocket.

“Hold up,” I said. “I don’t get this. What’s…”
The train came roaring into the station. I backed away confused and instinctively moved through its doors as they opened. I didn’t understand what was going on and I didn’t like that at all. The small-statured beauty was still crying on the platform as the train left. I should have felt nothing because that’s what I was used to. But I did.

How strange life was.

At home, I pulled the gun out of the bag and placed it gently on the coffee table, threw the Ziploc bag stuffed with sleeping pills I got from Eddie beside it, then did a fat rail of cocaine that he also got me with the rest of my money.

I sat down on the torn couch and looked around my shitty apartment. I broke tonight down into three stages. Let’s start with stage two: Dose myself with the sleeping pills. All of them. Down it with vodka seven. This way it was a guaranteed back up to stage three: blow my fucking brains out. And if I chickened out then stage two was there to take care of me anyway. It all sounded like a great plan but maybe it wasn’t. I mean, I wasn’t a trained professional in these matters but really…who was?

Let’s back up to stage one, the fun stage: get fucked on blow and enjoy the last hours a worthless piece of shit like me had on this earth. Yes, I was going to go all the way up before I came all the way down, permanently. This wasn’t sad. It wasn’t. Life was sad.

I was once a wealthy businessman. I had a wife and three kids (once). A house with a nice garden that the afternoon sun struck with a luminous intensity that reminded me of my childhood. Life seemed to just give and all I did was gain. And that is what it was for a time. But in the end, we all know that it eventually becomes a process of losing –regardless of how slow or how fast– everything that we had once accomplished, everything that we once held dear.

It may be good for you now. Yes, it just might be. In fact, it may be all golden roses on a silver platter –but you just give it time because that’s all you need. That’s all. See, we all fall. We all fail. We’re all fucked. And that’s when you start to miss things that aren’t there anymore. You miss them so much that you become a ghost yourself.

I am a ghost. That coke hit me faster than usual.

I would like to say that my habits were built from heartbreak but that was only partly true. Now they were all that I had left. I was a loser junkie with a bad heart and nothing was going to get better for me. Nothing. I guess I wasn’t as strong as I thought I was or maybe it was just age. Didn’t matter. It was time to get off the train.

But the girl…why? Why care? I didn’t get it, and it rapidly started to gnaw at me. I took the slip of paper out and looked at the several digits and dashes. A phone number. What the shit? Okay…

I was so unnerved by the situation at the time –knocked out of my determination for my own death and the timetable that I had constructed around it– that it completely took me off guard. I was always like that though to some extent: lost, wandering in thought and not really paying any attention to what was going on around me, like every time I went the grocery store.

“Fuck,” I said and took the gun and the pills and tossed them under the sink. Took my phone out and called the number half-expecting a hotline. But it was the girl, tears in her voice.

“Hello?”
“You don’t have to cry anymore,” I said.
The girl laughed in a really sad, relieved way. “I’m Mary.”
“Alex.” I returned, wondering who the, what the, how the fuck.

I guess some things were worth finding out. Really, what the Hell was I doing anyway? I guess that life can surprise you, even when you think that it was already over.

“Are you my angel?” I asked as I eyed the bag of coke.

How strange life was.