I always knew when Roger was high. Knew… and never did a damn thing about it. He'd come home, already high, or he'd shoot up in his room sometimes… I always shut myself in my room then, and forced myself to ignore whatever the hell he was doing. I'd cut film, or lean out my window and shoot people on the street, anything to distract me from how my best friend was slowly killing himself.

I should have confronted him about it, tried to knock some sense into him, but I just… never quite knew how. God, I wanted to, though. I wanted to grab him by the front of his coat and shake him, or find some way to make him just sit still and listen so I could yell at him, scream at him. Couldn't he see what he was doing to me, to April, to all of us? Did he even care? And what was so terrible about his life that he had to hide himself in a needle? Sure, we were cold and hungry and poor, but the rest of us handled it sanely, the rest of us never felt the need to lose ourselves in that drug-induced fog. What the hell frightened him so much about the life we had chosen? I should have yelled at him anyway, even if he yelled back. That's the way it is with Roger sometimes—you have to choose between the silence or a screaming fight that the neighbors can hear three buildings down. If I'd said something, just once…

I chose the silence instead. Pretending not to see the needles, the stash he kept hidden where he thought I'd never find it. Tiptoeing past him on the mornings after those wild nights, when he was always so irritable and would snap at you just for looking at him. Watching him so full of life and knowing, deep down, that he was edging closer and closer to the edge of out of control. Wanting to scream at him, when the words never made it past my lips. Why are you doing this to yourself, to us? Don't you see? Open your eyes—the world is beautiful! This pain you're hiding from, this is life!

I tried to tell him other ways. Every piece of footage I shot, every gritty, messy little detail, pain and love and disease and living and dying happening all around us, the things he never looked close enough to see the value in… I tried to show him. But then again, he never watched the things I filmed back then. It was only… afterwards that I ever got him to sit down and look at some of the things I'd shot. After the AIDS, after April…

I think he understood, a little, after that, and I never had to say a word.

But he understood a little too late.