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“Something bad?”
Bitter with regret, I nodded my response, which caused Molloy to choke out a huge, gut-wrenching sob.
“You can’t do that again.” Scrambling onto her hands and knees, she crawled over to where I was sitting and threw her arms around me. “You can’t, Joe. You just can’t.” Crying hard, Molloy clung to me like a baby monkey, holding onto my body like it was something of great importance to her. “I need you. I need you, Joe. You can’t do this to yourself.”
“It’s okay.” Rattled by just how deeply her pain affected me, I wrapped my arms around her. “Shh. It’s okay.”
“We could get out of here,” she sobbed against my neck. “You and me. We could just load up the car and leave this shithole town behind us. I would go with you, Joe. I would. I love you,” she continued to sob, peppering kisses down my neck. “I love you. I love you. I love you so fucking much, it makes me want to die.”
I believed her, and that scared me worse than the prospect of staying.
Because I knew that she was willing to do anything to help me, and, in the end, it wouldn’t be enough, because I was too fucking gone in the mind.
She was too good for me, too fucking good for the world. I knew deep down inside that I needed to let her go in order to give her some chance of a future.
But I justcouldn’t.
“I can’t leave them, Molloy,” I whispered, tightening my arms around her, when her body racked with sobs.I’m not my brother.“I have to stay.”
RESIGNED TO HEARTACHE
SEPTEMBER 1ST 2004
AOIFE
I never wantedto experience a day like today ever again.
There were no words to describe the level of helplessness I had felt when I watched Joey soar and then roughly crash and burn.
I wasn’t stupid.
I could see the red flags shooting up in every direction.
Problem was, I was too in love to take heed.
Because I knew that beneath all of the pain and bullshit, there was someone worth saving in there.
He was a good person who made terrible decisions.
He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone.
He was trying to survive in the only way he’d ever known how, by self-medicating.
Even as I watched him sleep it off on my bed, I could see the heartache he represented to me written all over every inch of his skin.
He was going to break my heart, I knew it. I could see it coming from a mile away, and I still couldn’t seem to get my self-perseveration instincts to kick in and protect me from the inevitable.
Listening to him talk about his father earlier was the most forthcoming he'd ever been with me.
Sitting in the middle of my bedroom, I couldn’t help but feel like my world had been rocked.
It was a monumental breakthrough.
The omission may have been lacking in specifics, and he held many more cards close to his chest, but for the boy lying next to me, it had been a Grand Canyon sized step closer to me.
I couldn’t walk away if I wanted to.
“You’re allI have to wake up for in the morning.”
