Miss you,
Ange

Miss you.

On the advice of friends, I consulted a psychiatrist during the first week in December.

After an hour, he told me I was suffering from clinical depression.

“I know that,” I said.

He leaned forward. “And how are we going to help you with that?”

I glanced at the door behind him, a closet, I assumed.

“You got Grace or Mae Cole back there?” I said.

He actually turned his head to check. “No, but—”

“How about Angie?”

“Patrick—”

“Can you resurrect Phil or make the last few months not have happened?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t help me, Doctor.”

I wrote him a check.

“But, Patrick, you’re deeply depressed and you need—”

“I need my friends, Doctor. I’m sorry, but you’re a stranger. Your advice may be great, but it’s still a stranger’s advice, and I don’t take advice from strangers. Something my mother taught me.”

“Still, you need—”

“I need Angie, Doctor. That simple. I know I’m depressed, but I can’t change it right now, and I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s natural. Like autumn. You go through what I went through, and you’d be nuts not to be depressed. Right?”

He nodded.

“Thank you for your time, Doctor.”

Christmas Eve

7:30 p.m.

So here I sit.

On my porch, three days after someone shot a priest in a convenience store, waiting for my life to begin again.

My crazy landlord, Stanis, actually invited me in for Christmas dinner tomorrow, but I declined, said I’d made other plans.

I might go to Richie and Sherilynn’s. Or Devin’s. He and Oscar invited me to join their bachelor’s Christmas. Microwaved turkey dinners and generous portions of Jack Daniel’s. Sure sounds tempting, but…

I’ve been alone on Christmas before. Several times. But never like this. I never felt it before, this dire loneliness, the hollowing despair of it.

“You can love more than one person at the same time,” Phil said once. “Humans are messy.”

I definitely was.

Alone on the porch, I loved Angie and Grace and Mae and Phil and Kara Rider and Jason and Diandra Warren, Danielle and Campbell Rawson. I loved them all and missed them all.

And felt all the more lonely.

Phil was dead. I knew that, but I couldn’t accept it enough not to want—desperately—that he wasn’t.

I could see us climbing out windows in our respective homes as children and meeting on the avenue, running up it together as we laughed at the ease of our escapes and headed through the bitter night to rap on Angie’s window and pull her into our desperado pack.

And then the three of us took off, lost to the night.

I have no idea what we used to do on half our midnight jaunts, what we used to talk about as we made our way through the dark cement jungle of our neighborhood.

I only know that it was enough.

Miss you, she’d written.

Miss you, too.

Miss you more than the severed nerves in my hand.