An Attempt Was Made

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I had managed to salvage some more concrete information from Enzo. He was also an only child, like me, eighteen and still in school, but it was his last year. Hopefully, he'd graduate high school before he turned nineteen. I had also worked up the nerve to ask him how and why he got into drugs. His answer was close to what I had anticipated: At first it was just another medicine he was prescribed. The abuse began much in the same way as mine did, he was growing tired of just surviving. He wanted to feel more, be alive in the truest sense of the word.
But then again, what does it mean to be alive? Neither of us knew.

When asked about his personality, he said, "People have told me a number of times that I'm "cool". I still have no idea what they mean. All I know is that I am only capable of feeling maybe one-tenth of the emotions that an average person feels in their lifetime. I can't cry, and it takes a lot to actually make me laugh. If that's what's called being 'cool', then yeah, I'm a cool person. I have, however, felt a certain kind of affinity towards things and people, which is more commonly described as love."

He wasn't guilty of any crime of any sort, as far as he could recall. And he had never even gone on a date, let alone sleep with people. But just because he never made love, that did not mean he was a virgin, he told me. He was quite the easy prey, and he had been used and taken advantage of while he was still just a little kid.

But I still couldn't bring him to answer the last two of my questions. The one about his family and the one about why he never called me by name. For the latter, though, he half-heartedly came up with an excuse- "I don't usually call people by their names."
"It's been a week already, and you still haven't brought my name on your tongue for once."
I was met with yet another awkward silence, while he sat upright on his bed, back against the wall, staring at the ceiling. Silence didn't seem to bother him in the least. He did not seem particularly lost in thought either. He just sat and stared. It was a weird sight, something that seemed extremely out of place.

That night, after we had dinner and took our meds we talked some more while waiting to fall asleep. We talked about hope and death. For Enzo, death was a source of hope, exactly the same as mine. We were both living, breathing paradoxes, each a conflicted contradiction of our own kind. Enzo resided in a reality far beyond time and space, where neither life nor death mattered. I, on the other hand, was obsessed with time. And strangely enough, ever since I met Enzo, I had started fighting again, the fire inside me was, once again, ignited. So even with my history of one too many suicide attempts, even if the thought of losing all consciousness gave me comfort, I did not consciously want to die anymore. But I just couldn't bring myself to say that out loud to Enzo.