Roger

He won’t have much to say after 10. If you can pry a word out of him, it’ll be because you hold the bottle or the fear of meaningless small talk has crept into the room. We don’t ever talk about the future because he generally remains too fixated on the past. He doesn’t dwell on mistakes or missed opportunities, but he’ll be the first to catch himself when he starts romanticizing memories and omitting painful details. He likes dealing with the abstract, and his general love of Buddhism would come across as superficial had you not been able to see how much pain is in his eyes.

What he wants to talk about would land him in a psych ward, which is a place he’s told his clinicians he’ll never return to, regardless of circumstance. I tread carefully in these types of conversations, never daring to ask whether he’ll go back to school or look to build some semblance of a healthy lifestyle here. One time, under the haze of the wine, I quipped that I remember everything he tells me, which seemed to put him on edge, as I would imagine it would with anyone with a drinking problem whose love for the substance was only trumped by the love of far-fetched story-telling.

To say that he is selfish would not be a fair accusation. He is just as vain and narcissistic as any of us growing up in the digital age. If anything, I am the culpable party in this relationship, as I find his pathological level of self-doubt and lack of ease in social settings a drug in and of itself. Nevertheless, I cannot say I feel guilty because I know he has his own reasons for bringing me into this distorted world. After all, you can only help someone who wants to help him or herself, and Roger has absolutely no desire for this and would fail to acknowledge his condition as a disease. For him, his depression deserves every ounce of respect.