My group of friends are talking about some get together thing they're doing over the weekend. This is rather normal as they do one almost every weekend, yet they never ask me to join. At least not anymore. Half the time it's as though I'm not even here.

I get it, I'm not the most interesting of people, but it's kind of ridiculous. I used to be in their group, but I took it for granted. I wished I didn't have to always hang out with people. That they would just leave me be like one would to a stranger. I never knew how much I'd hate it until it actually started to happen. It feels as though I'm not even here half the time. Why doesn't anyone pay attention? If we are friends then why are my words not heard?

I always wished I could be left alone when lots of people wanted to talk to me, yet now that they don't, I'd do anything to have them include me. Anything to no longer feel invisible.

I can't save you. You're dying, you will end yourself slowly, and all I can do is watch.

"Dad," I say every morning, facing the losing fight, after I bring in the paper, "Please eat." I offer to make anything I know how to cook. I have offered eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, pancakes, French toast, scrambles and when that fails, the food of your childhood, kosovska pogač, čalabrca, sudžuk, popara. I will make anything, no matter how little you eat.

Just so long as you eat something.

When you give in, I mark it on the calendar afterwards. You eat more if there's music on and people talking and I try to do both, flicking on the radio and speaking about anything that crosses my mind. I try not to be disappointed when you don't finish a meal. I try not to strain myself remembering the last time you finished one. I keep it together as you rant about conspiracies and spew racist rhetoric that ten, five, even two years ago you would have been appalled by. You make it easier than you know; when I want to rebuke you I see your hands shaking or the bags under your eyes and the words die on my tongue. You are always angry. I have never known you not to be, but these days it's a hatred of yourself and the world and every person around you that makes you unrecognizable.

You go downstairs and I listen to your wife, my mother, go about the day as if nothing is wrong. No one will talk about your weight loss, your thinning hair, your two hours of sleep a night, your obsession with death and suicide. Your wife thinks praying will make it all go away, your firstborn is pretending nothing is wrong, and I am trying to help someone who doesn't want to be helped. My right wrist has a burn scar from when I taught myself to make the Serbian foods you used to love so much, and when I glance at it, I wonder how soon it will be that it is the only thing I have to remember you by.

You've made it clear you resent everyone, suspect them of lying to you, don't trust anyone. You wrote me out of the will over a year ago. Will you be alive for your next birthday? For Christmas? Your heart, weakened by heart surgery and a lifetime in the Air Force under immense pressure, can't last forever. You know that. We all know that, but I don't believe prayer will save a man determined to self-destruct and I can't give up on everyone but myself like my brother. In a turn of events I would never have predicted I am stuck still caring about you. So I learned to cook food that is more often than not barely touched as if that will save you - as if that's any less foolish than praying or ignoring the problem.

Today you knocked the pot of gravy for toast and gravy all over the floor when I said I love you. "Sure you do," you snapped, "When it suits your purposes."

I knelt in the messy kitchen as you left and tried to remember it isn't your fault. Alzheimer's and Paranoid Personality Disorder did this, I thought as I stared at the floor, splatters all around me filling the room up with the scent of the breakfast you used to make every Sunday for my brother and I. You didn't mean it. It's my job to take care of you. I'm family, after all. Any second, I was going to get up, clean up, and make you peanut butter toast so you would at least have something on the table if you needed it.

Half an hour later, I came to myself when my mother shook me. Tears fell from my eyes as if on automatic. I watched the world as if a visitor in someone else's body, and I still can't quite find my way back to myself.

I can't save you. And I am a selfish man and a terrible son, because I just can't keep trying any longer.

In need of the fire.

Believe me when I say.

Nothing will last tonight.

Becoming lethargic.

Escaping my escape.

Like the hands on a clock.

Rarely touching.

Always together.

Touching the flame.

Burned a hole right through.

Beauty from afar.

Deadly when magnified.

Keep running away.

My hands are tied.

Run like the wind.

I'm out of breath.

Give up?

I can't.

Give in?

Too late.