Futility

It's hard to control what your heart tells you to do, sometimes.

It can be the comments made in passing that catch like a barb, jerking questions to your lips that you cant ask: a passing mention of a years-old eatng disorder, forcing me to exercise every scrap of control i posess to hold back the words that were already bubbling up: "When? What happend? How did no one notice and what caused it and how did you get better?"
Most of all, i wanted to ask how: "How can you think even for a second that you are anything other than so beautiful as you are? And what can I do, right now, to stop you ever suffering from this ever again in your life, because it hurts me to think of you hurting, and I'd do anything in the world to prevent it."

But I couldn't. She didnt need my clumsily worded questions or my sympathy or anything i could offer in that moment: i was five years too late to do anything to help, but i was still compelled to do something....anything... I didn't, of course.

It was too late, but i wanted to help, just like i wanted to go back a couple of weeks to stop my friend being alone in the ambulance nad then in the hospital. Her off handedness was surprising, but even so, i wanted to extract the promise that if she ever, ever was planning to be in an ambulance alone again, she would call me, at any hour of any day or night, because i couldnt bare to think of her being alone like that.

But i didnt say that either, of course. There was nothing i could say.

So instead i sipped my tea and hugged them goodbye and wished for the hundreth time that i could protect everyone i loved from everything bad, forever and ever, amen.