dear alexa grace

you kept me up last night

again

your nurse called for help

but i had no answers.

you looked frail in your bed, iv drips running in

both arms and a foot, the central line in your

neck pumping life-sustaining levophed and

vasopressin into your veins.

you froze when i entered the room, your eyes

accusatory. ashamed.

in one hand you held a syringe;

in the other, you clutched a saline flush

the nurse started speaking about white powders, but

i didn’t listen

the monitors held my attention

your heartrate was too fast

your blood pressure was too high

how are you feeling, alexa? i asked

you had chest pain, you said. but

you didn’t want me to come near, covering

the syringes with a blanket

hiding them

we were both scared, but for different reasons

cocaine isn’t allowed in the hospital

cocaine made your blood vessels spasm

your heart screamed for oxygen

but you wouldn’t let anyone near

what should we do? asked the nurse

oh alexa

what could we have done?

what had you done?

so many nights you keep me up

again and again

your chest pain resolved

(this time)

and the white powder in your room remains unfound

will you be this lucky next time?

good girl

ella, why did you throw your life away?

born two days later than my brother, you had a

future outside drugs. i wander through your past a

stranger, piecing together your story from the assorted

photos and cards in your room. i see you, a chubby tot, a

team captain, a prom queen, a friend, a daughter.

you are well-loved, corroborated by the flock of

visitors gracing your room at all hours. i’m an

outsider, invited into your most private circle by

catastrophe, witnessing your most intimate secrets. I

know the tattoos you kept hidden, the piercing your

mother never knew of. i’ve studied every inch of you

(although you’ll never know it), and your blood type and

eye colour meld with the logo of your favourite sports team in

my head, so that room 25 will always be that same green

rainbow, even after your jerseys and posters are long gone.

did you know, when you went to that party, that it would be

your last? did you know the drugs and chemicals by name?

were you frightened, when you felt consciousness slipping

from your fingers? would you have changed your mind, if

you had known how your mother would cry and your

father would argue?

<<our ella is a good girl>> they told me. <<we raised

her right. she wouldn’t do that.>>

except, you did.

the night you slip out is busy, and i almost miss the hiccupped

purr of the machines before catastrophe strikes. your

organs are failing too fast together, a synchronised attempt to

beat our best efforts. everything more that we did only seemed

to hurt, and your heart paused, unwilling to be coaxed into a

beat ever again.

but i didn’t cry until later, long after your body had been

wheeled away and a new boy had taken over your room, a

boy whose sobbing mother grabbed my shoulders and said to me:

<<my joshua is a good boy. i raised him right. he wouldn’t do that.>>

on his high

he lies in the dark, on white stretcher sheets

his veins fill with blood, but his heart doesn’t beat

he lies in the dark, in a grim, shadowed room

visited only by Death, who arrived far too soon

he lived life indifferent, loved drugs and drink

(the young learn to drive far before they can think)

that’s why rubber burns as glass shatters around

the car bends and folds, as he’s thrown to the ground

and he won’t wake up, no, Death never gives in.

we might rage in battle, but Death always wins.

here he lies on a bed from which he’ll never rise

the boy in the dark, who crashed on his high

confessions of an ex-teenager #768

matt wilson with the locker next

to mine would come to school with

brownies not the chocolate kind and

sell them from his locker 10 bucks

a piece and he’d go outside during

break and smoke a joint and dump his coat

that reeked of smoke and then my locker

would smell too and i always waited for the

day when i would go home and my mother

would flip because i smelled smoky even

though i never ever picked one up

honest to god but who would
believe me if i blamed someone with the name

matt wilson?