“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“It’s your birthday,” he said. “And you’re still my favorite person. And
I’ve missed you.”
It was probably no later than ten o’clock when he got there, but we
talked so much, I remember it was after midnight the next time I looked at
the clock. I can’t even remember what all we talked about, but I do
remember how I felt. He seemed so happy and there was a light in his eyes
that I’d never seen there before. Like he’d finally found his home.
He said he wanted to tell me something and his voice grew serious. He
readjusted me so that I was straddling his lap, because he wanted me to
look him in the eyes when he told me. I was thinking maybe he was about to
tell me he had a girlfriend or that he was leaving even sooner for the
military. But what he said next shocked me.
He said the first night he went to that old house, he wasn’t there because
he needed a place to stay.
He went there to kill himself.
My hands went up to my mouth because I had no idea things had gotten
that bad for him. So bad that he didn’t even want to live anymore.
“I hope you never know what it’s like to feel that lonely, Lily,” he said.
He went on to tell me that the first night he was at that house, he was
sitting in the living room floor with a razor blade to his wrist. Right when
he was about to use it, my bedroom light went on. “You were standing there
like an angel, backlit by the light of heaven,” he said. “I couldn’t take my
eyes off you.”
He watched me walk around my bedroom for a while. Watched me lie on
the bed and write in my journal. And he put down the razor blade because
he said it’d been a month since life had given him any sort of feeling at all,
and looking at me gave him a little bit of feeling. Enough to not be numb
enough to end things that night.
Then a day or two later is when I took him the food and set it on his back
porch. I guess you already know the rest of that story.
“You saved my life, Lily,” he said to me. “And you weren’t even trying.”
He leaned forward and kissed that spot between my shoulder and my
neck that he always kisses. I liked that he did it again. I don’t like much
about my body, but that spot on my collarbone has become my favorite part
of me.