Here's a story:

[trickykitty]

Back in junior high, I had a friend with whom I spent quite a lot of time. She dragged me a few times to a non-denominational church she had heard about, which was interesting, because I got to watch a non-church-goer actually get into going to church. I don't think she ever really got into religion, but she liked attending that church. It gave her some kind of sense of belonging that I could never understand nor cared for. She was the punk-rocker type, always wearing safety pins in her jeans and wild makeup and hair. I spent the better part of a year being her friend. She ended up moving away and we never kept in contact after that.

I remember one day she decided to be experimental. I don't recall what it was that she used, it could have just been aspirin for all I remember, but she chopped up a couple over-the-counter pills into a fine powder and snorted a line. She was spending the next 30min trying to run water through her nose to flush it out because it was burning.

She wanted me to bear witness to the event, and to be on hand if anything went "wrong", because obviously snorting something that wasn't meant to be snorted isn't wrong in and of itself. As a friend, I abided. While she was attempting to clear out her sinuses, her anger and disappointment was transmitted to me when she asked emphatically, "How could you let me do that?"

I didn't respond. I let her continue the cleanup of her own experiment, and within an hour the incident was put behind us and we had moved on to some other pointless teenage exercise in futility.

So here's my thing. I can still hear her asking me that question in my mind. It stuck with me. There was a sound of momentary desperation in her voice when she uttered it that pinged a nerve within me. We go through life with people around us making stupid decisions. Sometimes we speak up, and sometimes we let them fall down on their own, and sometimes we do both - you can always tell them "I told you so" afterwards. There's a small part of me that wonders what my answer to her query would have been. Why did I let her do it? Why didn't I stop her? Why didn't I talk to her until I was blue in the face that this was Bad Idea #357?

I wonder if she would have listened.