DOA and body found

He was one month older than me, to the day. Walking down to his room in the basement, I thought this was his world as I trudged down the steps, it smelled like shit and piss and old beer, stale cigarettes and unwashed clothes. His skin was jaundiced and pale. When the paramedics strapped him to the board his arms kept flopping off his paunch, like a suffocating fish. That's how we knew rigor hadn't set in, and also the first clue that he wouldn't be resuscitated.

The ghost lingered after the body was gone. There was vomit on the side of his pillow, a small stain, camouflaged by the spent epinephrine needles and AED wrappers. There was a violently loud stain on the couch where he was found, slumped over; the contents of his bladder, after the muscles stopped working. The coffee table was littered with empty beer bottles and cigarette ash, and his despondent cousin was still metabolizing whatever drug (or drugs) they had consumed together.

Eyes fixed and dilated.

We searched the basement for a reason why, as if God was waiting under some unturned cushion or pillow, and if we could only find Him, He'd tell us what had actually happened. Instead we found drugs, and pictures of a dearly departed girlfriend who had passed just four months previous. I think they call that motive. Or at least a reasonable suspicion of same. He had a shrine to her next to his bed.

I kept waiting for the emotion to kick in. A sense of loss, or reverence, or at least a quiet respect. But the accumulation of beer bottles and cigarette ash only served as a reminder that life should not be lived so destructively... as if it were an ever narrowing path to a finite end.

DB joked around with me and made PS grab my leg when I surveyed the closet. JD laughed and sighed and passed his judgment silently, as he always does. Not a one of us offered comfort to the anguished man upstairs or was very understanding when he cursed us as we left. All of us were playing our roles as if scripted. As if our feet were on tracks and we couldn't help but where they led us.

And the whole time I felt his ghost, hovering, just above my shoulders. Was this really my life? Is this really it, then? My God...

Bless me Father, for I have sinned...