No Help Here

I found his notebook a few months after he had passed away.
It was in his bedroom between the mattress and the box-spring.
There weren't very many people that came around after he passed,
so I just left his things as they had been. I sat on the bed and began
to flip through the pages, reading bits and pieces here and there.
We weren't as close as we had once been by the end, we still
cared about each other but it as different. There were times where
it was hard to read his writing, not so much because of what he had
written but because his penmanship was like mine, atrocious. What
I could read wasn't surprising. He struggled to get clean but refused
to let anyone help him. I tried, I really tried to help out but he just
wouldn't have it. He wrote about how lonely the struggle to get
clean was. He didn't have to go about it that way but what more
can you do when someone refuses your help? What can you do
when someone refuses to ask for help? When I was done I set
the notebook on the bed and looked out his window. It faced
the brick wall of the alley. Below, I could hear the garbage truck
gorging itself on the cast off remains of so many lives.