Checking In

Just letting you know I’m here for you if you ever need to reach out.

Hey man is everything ok? I noticed there was an exaggerated hitch in your gait as you advanced toward me in the dead of the night, and your bulging, bloodshot eyes never once blinked, and your bruised and blistered skin had the pallor of forest fungus, and your jaw hung open slackly as a drawbridge with severed chains, and your anguished, discordant groans bespoke an insatiable hunger too ancient and taboo for me to give a name to, and when you called my own name aloud, it did not sound like my own name, and it hinted at no intimacy with who I was—it was as if you remembered nothing about me, as if some virus or chemical coursing through your frontal cortex had stripped the meaning from the sound of my name while leaving the sound intact, and yet in my confused understanding of that utterance was my identity entire, a broken summons of my very being, like an obliterated mirror—if sound could be a mirror—in which my reflection was still recognizable albeit fractured into a hundred or thousand irregular triangles—and as I was processing all of this, you shambled through the space between us and reached me and grabbed me with a hand I scarcely recognized, for its knuckles oozed, and its fingernails hung off its fingertips like the tassels of a pagan staff, and you tore into the taut flesh of my neck and arms with teeth no longer any recognizable shade of white—inky incisors like moldy spearpoints loosely mortared in a bunker of weeping gums—and I cried out in pain, and agony, and fright, and bewilderment, and betrayal, and I’m only bringing this up because I care about you so much and don’t want to see you go through this, whatever this is, alone, and I hope you know that you can always talk to me if there’s anything you’re going through even if you don’t think you need help, or if you know you need help but don’t think I’m the best person to help you—because I am—anyone is when you’re going through something that you yourself don’t recognize as something you are going through—and even if I can’t help you myself, you should always, always know that I would do nothing short of anything I could to get you the help you needed if anything was harming you because I love you—I really love you—and I’m not just saying that to make you feel better or to make you calm down and stop biting me—I’m not one of those people who is uncomfortable unless everyone he loves is happy and acting perfect all the time—I’m okay with you being you, even when you’re going through this, whatever this is—I’m here for you, and I’m ready to listen.