I sat at the foot of his bed, and he stood beside me with his pants half down, the top of his belt hugging the base of his **** and a thick bed of ***** hair curling over his jeans. On the sides of his upper-thighs where they grabbed the hips, his skin was striped with razor lines.

“I cut myself here so no one can see.”

People never trust you with these sorts of things when you’re sober. Then they open up to you with such shocking honesty and determination to reach something human in someone else, secretly trying to identify something human in themselves.

I thought to myself “what kind of genuine advice can I give him?” I thought this because I didn’t actually have anything genuine to tell him. I was riddled with uncertainty—which I certainly wasn’t about to reveal to him.

I kept searching for the advice that would mend the sores of my half-panted friend with his bare thighs in my face and his heart on the floor in-front of my laced converse. But I had nothing. So I simply told him, “Want to get lunch sometime?”

He agreed that we would.

A few days went by, and both of us got distracted with life as tends to happen. Our lunch date felt more and more remote. But then I started to feel a little sad myself. Then I started to feel a lot sad, and I thought about death a lot. I wondered if this was the way he felt before talking to me, so I called him and asked to meet me for lunch.

We met up in a Chinatown bar, drinking cheap beer and trying to be young. After a few sips, he asked me why I had been feeling sad lately, but I still didn’t know what to tell him. If I had known, I would have had an answer for him when we sat by his bed, drunk.

I don’t think he knew what to say either, so we sat at the table and drank.

He told me I was a great man, and lucky too. I told him he was the best man I knew.

But somehow we both knew we had lied. Or at least our good praise cancelled each other out.

That night, I got a phone call. He had moved away in the night across the country. He told me to come visit, and I said that I would. Naturally, I never went out to visit him, he was simply too far and I didn’t care quite enough. But I still think about what I would say to him.