[william]

The Summer Of Tears.

It’s the dreamy part of my youth. I’m floating between sixteen and thirty. Too much excess, too much access, and zero guidance. Literature saved my life. It showed me a different way of thinking, of living.

I’m madly in love with this girl. The fist true love of my life. But she’s falling for my friend and he likes her too.

Joanie and I speak ever day. She tells me I’m her best friend, shredding me each time, giving me false hope that somehow our friendship will become much more. I’m obsessed with her the way only a love starved, driven man-child could be. Everything I do I do for her; each thought is tainted with echoes of her. I go to bed with her name on my lips and wake with her voice in my head.

Years later I still love her. Love has many flavors.

And so here I am, caught up in my own little fantasy world, ignoring everyone around me, focused solely on a girl I could never have. Then it happens.

In front of me my parent’s marriage is coming apart, my brother is beginning a path that will destroy his life for years to come, my sister - an innocent - is seeing and feeling things that no child should ever. She will soon leave my life, her absence will wretch my heart with a pain I never want to know again.

I come home from school to find my mother, in bed, crying, gasping, and my only thoughts are "Fuck, I’m supposed to see Joanie later."

"What’s wrong?" I ask my mother.

"I wanna die..." she cries. "I wanna die!"

Hours later, I come home. My mother’s sedated, spending the night in the psychiatric ward on suicide watch. They made her drink charcoal.

The phone rings and it’s Joanie. She’s crying.

"My mother..." She tells me. "My mother was raped..."

"Not tonight," I cry back into the phone. "Not tonight. Not tonight. Not tonight..."