There was nothing left to say. Maybe I've said it all, explored it all. I'm not so old but sometimes I feel it, feel it in my bones, weary bone tired. Smoking cigarettes for something to do, not even caring about cancer. There were dangers all around and I've lost the will to worry about them. Death will come one day, that was certain. It was wasted time to be afraid.
Feeling wrung out like some dirty dishrag. Feeling the energy I know I had once, feeling it slip away. Feeling it be drained away. Every day is like that slow part of Sunday, that weird white sunny still time when nothing you do seems to matter. Walking among the dried leaves, crunching them under my feet, feeling my mouth tasting like ashes. Food has no flavor. Is this sadness, or something more lasting and more damaging? And who will care? Sometimes I say that, "who'll care anyway?" It's a real question, it's not rhetorical. Who will care when I won't?
Sleeping outside in the cold and I can't even feel the cold anymore. Feeling the hits that keep coming and I can't even feel them anymore. One more injury doesn't matter, one more bruise and black eye and cut and scrape. It doesn't add up anymore. The damage is done. I'm too tired to even kill myself but not too tired to talk about it. And I talk about it because when I have energy I just can't take it anymore. I can't take all the fighting and the violence and the way we hate them and they hate us because they have money and we don't. I'm tired of it all. Ponyboy says it's different in the country but I'm not so sure. This city, this neighborhood, is in my cells and my bones. It's too deep to get out. Nothing could save me now.
I don't always feel this way. Sometimes I can feel like myself again, or the me I wanted to be once. Sometimes things are quiet enough that I can hear myself think again. But not often.
I wish I could be Dallas. He's gallant, like them southern guys in that book Pony likes. I guess I like it, too. I can see why he likes books so much now. I never realized you could see yourself in those books. It's cool. And the sunsets and the clouds and colors and all that? I'd never really noticed it before, not when I was stuck in Tulsa with all that smog. Not when I was just trying not to get hit when my old man got drunk and mean. How can you notice that stuff when your life is like mine was? And I envied Ponyboy because his life wasn't like that, he had a certain kind of space and time and calmness to notice things and to think, he had what I didn't have.
I meant it when I said those kids' lives were worth more than mine. It was worth it to save them. I minded dying at first, once I knew that was where it was headed. I was so tired, and I thought how I didn't get to do so many things and see so many things and now it would all be gone. But the kids' parents, some of them, they stopped by to thank me and I just felt that it was worth it. Maybe it wouldn't make up for killing that boy at the park. I couldn't make up for that.
It's getting late now. I can barely see the light outside the window. And I'm sorry I sent my mother away like that, when she came to see me. I mean, can I really be mad at her now? She could never be what I needed her to be but it's too late, can't go back and change it. I should have let her come visit me. But I'm still a kid, really. Even though I'm dying, I'm still a kid. I'll always be a kid. I gotta write that letter to Ponyboy, there's a lot I need to tell him. I don't know if he'll be back to see me before the end, but even if he does come and visit again I might be too tired by then to say what I need to say to him. I think I figured out that poem he had memorized, I think I can see what it means for us.
It's all the guys I'll miss most of all. They were my family, not my parents. At least I had someone, you know? I just wish I had figured all this stuff out before it was too late for me. But I bet I wouldn't have figured it out. Sometimes only the impending doom will make you see anything. But Pony's smart enough that if I tell him some of it he could figure out the rest.
So tired now, it's a funny kind of tired. The oxygen thing in my nose used to bother me but I can barely feel it now. I don't get those jolts of pain anymore, either. Thinking is funny, now, too. I could see all the fighting us greasers and socs were doing and it really was useless. It seemed like it mattered so much before, but I can see now that it doesn't. And it ain't just greasers and socs doing all that fighting and hating, it's so many other people all over the place, and they can't see beyond it. I used to be like that, too. I could just see everybody at that rumble, all that fighting and for what? That isn't the way to be.
So tired now, I can't even open my eyes. But I can't feel any pain anymore. I bet I could forgive my parents for all that happened. It was worth it to save those kids, and I'm glad that I did. Their lives are worth more than mine. At the church that morning everything was all gold, the mist and everything, that sunrise. I don't remember ever seeing a sunrise before that one.
Noises were sort of soft sounding, distant. But I knew when someone was in the room with me, and I felt Dallas touch my arm where it wasn't burned. I knew it was him, I could tell before he even spoke.