You’re scrolling through your phone feed, looking at everything in sight. You come across your best friend’s contact. He sends you a message. He says things no child should ever say, and he’s about to do something no child should ever do. You try to talk him out of it. He won’t listen. You race there as fast as you can. After breaking the lock and bursting inside, you freeze in the dead silence, broken only by a single gunshot echoing through the empty house that once felt like home to you. You burst into his room, breaking down the door again. He’s there—lying on the floor, bleeding out; a gun is in his hands. It’s a seven-hour drive to the hospital. You know he won’t survive. You try to stop the bleeding, but the ambulance won’t arrive for another six hours. It’s useless. He’s still alive—barely. He keeps muttering how sorry he is and promises that in the next life he’ll try to be better. He dies—just as the ambulance pulls up; you realize the doctors won’t be able to do anything for him now. They put him on a stretcher; you sit next to him in the ambulance and, watching the doctors desperately try to save him, suddenly realize: you feel nothing. You want to cry, scream, beg God for him to survive—but you can’t. It feels as though you’ve cried over things like this too many times already—as though you’ve grown used to it. This feeling makes you feel guilty: it seems to you that you’re indifferent to his death. But that’s not true! So why don’t you feel anything? Lost in your thoughts, you don’t notice how time flies: it seems like the ambulance drove too fast—it was only a two-minute ride to the hospital, though it felt like the trip lasted six hours. They take him to a ward, and you’re asked to wait in the emergency room. Two hours... Two hours of futile procedures; two hours during which you agonize, trying to figure out: did he really mean that much to you? Finally, the doctor comes out—with that very expression that all doctors have when they can’t save a patient. She says there was nothing they could do—even though they tried very hard. The hospital has informed his family that the funeral has already been scheduled, and you weren’t invited. Maybe it’s for the best—you won’t have to sit there and watch his body being lowered into the ground. When you get home, you turn on the computer. There’s not much you can do about his death right now; there’s no point in talking about it when you feel so devastated. Let’s see what your friends are up to online!
