“Put down the gun.”

His hands were shaking, not used to the death that was in his fingers. For a man who wanted to die, he seemed awfully unsure of just what was going to happen next. This was the part I clung to, the part I could reason with. His icy eyes were screaming both for help and for a permanent end. He wanted to cease his story in the middle of the book, but maybe he hadn’t given up on it completely. Maybe, just maybe, he loved me enough to stay.

“No!” he screamed. “I’m done! I want to die, Helen! I want to die!” Jake pushed the gun against his head for emphasis. I’m sure part of him really wanted to die, but if the rest of him did too than he would have already been dead.

I ventured a step. “I know, Jake. I know. I know you’re hurting and you want the pain to stop, and it will stop, but not like this, Jake. Not like this.” It turned out that when someone’s life dangled on your red string of fate, you tended to repeat things a lot. It’s like saying everything a second time will somehow make the words go through.

“Please let me die. Just leave and let me die.” He was crying now, not a pretty cry, that ugly snotty, gasping cry that sounded like bubbling agony. His whole body was shaking now, not just his hands. “Just let me die,” he whisper-sobbed.

In truth, it was partly his fault that I was here in his hour of self-destruction. It was his fault for forgetting his textbook in my room and not remembering to lock his dorm room like every other college student. I walked in on him with a gun in his hand. I had never seen a gun in real life before, let alone so close, let alone pointed at the person I loved.

“I love you, Jake. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Won’t you stay for me?” I couldn’t believe I was actually trying to guilt trip him into not killing himself. The whole thing was surreal, like a nightmare, like a wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat-with-your-throat-raw-from-screaming kind of nightmare, which I imagined I will have a lot of those kinds of nightmares if I actually saw my boyfriend blow his brains out on these plain white walls, putrid brown and green carpet, and his stupidly unmade bed with the Star Wars sheets I bought him. I tried not to imagine the police or janitor or whoever’s job it was to clean up dead bodies picking up the flecks of brain matter from between his swarm of opened textbooks, but the image came into my head anyways, and suddenly I knew this isn’t a dream, but very, painfully, gut-wrenching reality.

“But I didn’t get in, Helen. I didn’t get the job. I can’t move out the house. I’m going to die anyways. If I have to live one more year in that house, I’m going to die. He’s going to hurt me, Helen. He’s going to keep hurting me and hurting me and I don’t know if I can live through it anymore.”

It was true. Jake’s home life was one horror story after another. And he didn’t even tell me everything. He couldn’t. It hurt too much. I knew that he didn’t get that New York City architecture job that he and I both thought was practically guaranteed, but I didn’t realize he was this upset about it. I didn’t realize he was going to kill himself over it. Sure, he hadn’t been sleeping again, and he was rather distant, but suicide never entered my realm of possibilities until now.

I took another step forward, now I was ugly-crying and shaking because I saw with absolute clarity that the love of my life was going to fall off of a cliff if I didn’t stop him. “Please, Jake. I love you. I love you so damn much. We’ll figure something out and you’ll never have to go home again, even if I have to hide you in my damn closet, even if I have to drop everything to run away with you, then that’s what I’ll do. You’re going to do so many great things, Jake. You’re going to build so many skyscrapers and meet so many people and see so many places, so don’t give it all up, Jake! Don’t throw away your life like it doesn’t mean anything! Because it means something to me, Jake! And it’s going to mean a lot to a whole world of people someday! So put down that gun and kiss me, damn it!” I couldn’t speak anymore as the sobs ripped through my lungs and out of my mouth. I shook like I was being electrocuted.

But by some miracle, he gave up his gun, his clean death. He gave it up for me.

We collapsed onto the floor, holding each other and crying until we couldn’t cry anymore.