One day you were gone.

It was beyond my child’s mind to grasp the specifics or ramifications. Even now, many years later, I still find it impossible to wrap my head around. You were alive and whole and smiling through tears when I left in my family’s car for the train trip which would take me out of town to the country for the week. We had promised we would meet again for Christmas and New Year’s after that.

A promise you did not keep.

One I know you had no control over, but at the time I suppose I blamed you. I wanted…no, I suppose I needed it to be someone’s fault. I needed it to not be true more than anything else but the notion that life could be so cruel as to take you away from me was a thought I could not fathom.

I had seen your smile a scant few days before. I had heard your voice and saw how hard you fought back the tears I would openly shed myself once I clambered into the back seat of that hateful car taking me away from you. You were. The reality that you were no longer was not one I understood or could accept or forgive.

I stood beside the remains of your house tucked away on a small lane on the outskirts of town and stared at it for many long hours. It was nothing but blackened wood and twisted metal lying in a misshapen heap. Nothing of you remained. Your smell had been replaced with the sickly odor of burnt timber. It made me nauseous, and I vomited in the remains of your front flower garden.

Our teacher tried to explain why you were gone, but I refused to listen. You were and then you were not. That’s all I understood. I hated you for leaving me. Not nearly as much as I loved you, but I still hated that you were gone.

The stone marking your name was so miniscule. Your grave so tiny it didn’t seem possible you were lying there. You always seemed so much larger than life to me, although you were shorter than I. Your smile lit up my life and your voice was the sweetest music to my ears. Your eyes could pierce the gloomiest of days and bring back the sun. And, yet, in the end you fit inside a tiny plot of land beneath a pathetic stone marking only that you were and were no longer.

Many times I would come to visit you. I brought flowers from your garden. I knew you liked the purple and yellow ones the best. I never knew what they were called. I simply knew that you liked them. I would talk to your name. I would tell you about school. I would tell you about what was happening in town and on the covers of magazines we’d read together. I would tell you how much I missed you. I would tell you how much I loved you and needed you. Words I could only say after your ears had already been closed. There were times when I almost felt you were there with me. Comforting me, consoling me. I would try hard not to cry and fail, collapsing to my knees on the walk back from the cemetery each time and sobbing until I could no longer catch my breath..

Soon enough, though, they tore down the skeletal remains of your house and bulldozed your garden. They built a convenience store over where you had once been and then there was nothing left to remind me of you except a pitiful stone in a lonely cemetery. I tried to clean the brush from where you slept but the thorns tore my fingers and hands, and I finally gave up.

When my parents and I moved before high school I thought of visiting you one last time but couldn’t bring myself to. After all, you were not there anymore, were you?

The you who lay in fear of the dark on my floor when you stayed over or talked about flowers or movies or how much you wanted to come to the country with me to visit my grandmother had long faded to a memory. The cold could not chill you; the dark could not frighten you, and the smoke and flames which were your last horrible memory could no longer hurt you. You were relegated to the past, a shadowy form who I could recall only slivers of.

Even now, though many years have passed, you are still there. I find my mind traveling back to our time together. The days and nights we shared. The touch of your hand in mine, the feel of your skin or the way your hair wrapped around my arm when we walked, blown wild by the summer breezes and I cry.

I cry because I need that release. I cry because my memories of you and my thoughts of days long gone well up like a geyser and if I don’t let them go, I will surely overflow and explode.

I no longer know for whom I cry. At first, I thought it was for you. But I now think it is for me that I cry. For whom and what I lost. For who you were and for how much you meant and still mean to me. You were my very best friend. You will always be a part of me, and you will always be my only true love.

Perhaps one day when my time is done, I will be able to find my way to you. I don’t know if such a thing is possible, but I am willing to find out. I have made it clear that when this world tires of me or I of it, I am to be buried next to you so that even if I never get to see you again in the next life or whatever lies after, I will at least be next to you where I belong.