Lucas Scott once said, “There are moments in our lives when we find ourselves at a crossroads. The choices we make in those moments can define the rest of our days.” We often find ourselves at these “crossroads” alone and afraid and it often seems as though we don’t have a genuine reason to persist on. A person isn’t a person by himself. He is made up of all the people he has grown close to and those who he has affected. That is why when people are alone, they are weak and easy to manipulate.

My eyes had finally just opened from a late night alone at home. I was awakened by a text message I received from my brother which read,” I’ll always love you Christopher. Never forget that.” I lay there in my bed for a few seconds, reading, re-reading and then reading the message again. What did it mean? Why would he send it to me? I looked at the date and time for the message and feared that it would be a dark day in the future. March 9, 11:37 A.M. So many thoughts flooded my mind all at once. Although I truly had no clue what this text meant, one cruel and selfish idea stuck around in my head longer than the others. I would’ve gone to my parents and asked them about it but they were halfway across the world in Italy. I was isolated at home with my grandmother who spoke little to no English, and my cousin who never felt so powerless to me.

I’ll never know why I didn’t text my brother back or call him and ask what was wrong or even what the text meant. But I didn’t and that will haunt me for the rest of my life. I would spend the next hour or so trying to distract myself, trying to get the evil thoughts off of my mind. But just when I was beginning to forget everything, the phone rang. I went to the phone but just stared down at it; too afraid to pick it up. My hand trembled above the phone and a flash of what I might hear on the other side went through my mind. I didn’t pick it up, I couldn’t pick it up, and so my grandmother did. Within seconds of her answering the phone I could hear her wailing and crying from across the house. I fell to my knees and as though the levy holding my tears back had broken, I began to cry, and knew inside what had happened.

She walked up the stairs and gave me the worst news I would ever hear. When she reached me, tears were already rolling down my face. My brother had attempted suicide and was in surgery at Kendal Regional Hospital in Miami. He was in a surgery that had a five percent success rate. Of course that success rate was made on how many of the victims lived, only a fraction of one percent of these victims would live and recover to the former people they once were. I feared that even if my brother lived, he would never be the same. He was alone in our grandparents’ large house with a broken heart and was not using good judgment. I know that especially he will be forever regretful of this mistake.

In this moment there are seven billion one hundred ninety two million ten thousand and eighty nine people in the world. And all I needed was one, one man to make the right choice, the choice not to give up, and not to let life get the best of him. In the Book of Proverbs, in the Bible it states, “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.” I believe that this quote could not be more perfect. He did this because he was alone, just how almost all bad decisions are made when you are alone. The worst form of regret is regretting something that you didn’t do. I will always regret not calling my brother when I received that text. But I didn’t call because I was weak. I was weak because I was alone and afraid, for the body does not consist of one member but of many.