The Sanctuary Beyond the Undergrowth

He told me that everyone in his family knows he’s a failure. “I’m homeless half the time,” he said. “This fucking park is my home.” He started crying and endlessly listing all the things that were wrong with him. He was always really mean to others; he only cares about himself; he never listened to anyone's advice, no matter how useful it was; he always got in fights for stupid reasons; he used to drink so much he got cornered and robbed; he had been to the hospital over 5 times for suicide attempts and has a growing bill that needs to be paid; he stole money from his parents once; he used to be a cocaine addict but now he can’t even afford that; he hasn’t eaten in nearly a week and he doesn’t know how he’s still able to walk; he uses girls all the time and steals their money; he’s been to jail twice; even after all the trouble he’s been through, he still doesn’t want to get a job and support himself; he doesn’t want to go to college; he just wants to finally die and may have an idea of how to do it.

He wouldn’t let me talk. He just rambled, took short pauses to whimper, sigh, sniffle, or sob, and then continued to ramble. It became so much that he just got up and walked off, telling me not to fucking follow him or else he’d strangle me. I sat there and waited in the cold until he came back. His eyes were bloodshot, face flushed, and shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “You can’t hang out with someone like me, Elouise; you—you just have so much ahead of you.” He still couldn’t look me in the face. “I’m all bad, just bad. You won’t gain shit hanging around me.”

Despite that, my heart still clings to Keith. He may have no one to turn to, he may have done all these awful things, but I can feel it—there’s a sanctuary beyond the undergrowth. He always pushes everyone away because he wants to be loved. He wants someone to take the extra effort to tell him that he’s not as bad as everyone makes him out to be. I know it because I can see it when he looks at me with this short, wry grin. He always reached out to me, wanting so badly to touch me and do something to comfort himself, but he never knew how. I wanted to love him. I wanted to love him and for him to love me.

It was impossible. Every time I walked up to him and sat beside him while he stared lifelessly at all the girls passing in their school uniforms, I knew it was completely impossible. And Keith knew it, too, but he just never wanted to break my heart. He was so kind and he didn’t even know it.

But I couldn’t be the one to tell Keith that he was important, so every local news channel flashed short clips of a young man jumping off of the Seaside bridge. After every commercial break I sat in front of the television and caught up, watching policemen remove a body from the river and wrap it up accordingly.

I couldn’t even bring myself to say

“I’m sorry.”