Robert

Well, Robert was a Puerto Rican born in Brooklyn, heavy set and sweaty, with a kind demeanor and a dark past. Many years ago, I trained his wife for a job. I met him through her and he immediately gave me a tight hug.
We became friends and talked extensively about life and our past experiences. I learned I could rely on him in moments of need, aka when I got stranded at an airport, with nobody to pick me up in the middle of the night.
During one of our conversations, I learned he used to be a gang member, shot twice and yet somehow still alive. He had a witch mother who gave birth to many kids and never looked after them. He's been molested by an uncle at a very young age and his mother woke him up in the middle of the night, grabbed some things and jumped on a bus to LA. His mother, his sister and himself lived on Skid Row for a while, where he learned the rules of the streets. He became a drug user. He did a lot of speed, he prostituted himself for some pocket money, he rhymed and wrote poetry in his spare time. He eventually got married to a woman he bought a house for. He also gave her two kids before he jumped back into drugs and the darkness of his inner monsters.
He met my friend in a Romeo and Juliet kind of love story and started cleaning up his ways, only that he lost himself in the process. He tried to fit in. He tried to cope with reality, but reality is a bitch. He was confused at best. He acknowledged how little he really knew about normality and he indulged in feeling like an outsider. He lived in fear of "gray shadows out to get him".
Every time I saw him, he would hug me just the same, we would talk just the same, yet there was nothing I could say to comfort him. His fear grew exponentially until he couldn't bare it anymore and he would drug himself up to not deal with it.
The last time we talked about darkness, I went to their house. We stayed up late. I complained about my life. I was struggling with accepting some sadness/anger feelings targeting my pedophile father. Robert said something unusual that night. He said: "I'm clairvoyant and I see you are in danger. Something bad will happen to you, you'll be in the hospital. Don't do it! Don't do it."
"Don't do what?" I was thinking. I know my complaints sounded dreary, but I never mentioned doing something to hurt myself, I was just getting it out. I was not even depressed. I was just kind of sad.
A year went by. We saw each other twice more. He was absent and spent.
Last Sunday, I received a phone call from his sister. Robert is dead. Robert killed himself.
It turns out that when he was saying "Don't do it", he was just asking for my help. I just couldn't read him. I couldn't hear him, blinded by my own pain. Could I have helped him in any way? Probably not. Most I can do is listen. And it hurts to witness all this suffering and acknowledge my littleness, my incapacity to help others.