You Should Be Here

By

I’m still writing about you.

These articles and poems are starting to feel like eulogies. I keep trying to give your death meaning. I keep trying to revive you with words, mistaking the humming of my laptop for a pulse. If I tap these keys in the correct rhythm, they almost sound like the hands of a clock, reaching and stealing back all that was wasted, one second at a time. Maybe, if I type fast enough, I can go back. Back to that warm summer day, the first week of June, 2012.

I will never forget the way your face lit up in that school parking lot when you saw me for what I had no idea would be the last time. You were glowing, and the high noon sun had nothing to do with it. Your deep blue eyes were so full of life. You were talking about college, and how excited you were to start studying biology. You hugged me, and it caught me off guard. You hugged me, and all the bullshit from the past was no longer valid. You hugged me, and I wouldn’t trade that moment for anything in the entire world.

It’s all I have left of you now.

That, and a T-shirt. Not to mention, a heart heavy with regret. I still find myself scribbling your name in notebook margins, absentmindedly. Trying to write you back in to existence. Nobody really talks about you anymore. Sometimes, I wonder if you were merely a figment of my imagination; A crazy beautiful hallucination, knocking the wind out of any darkness that this world had to offer. That is, until the world knocked the wind out of you.

Love can be terrifying. The risks people are willing to take, and the sacrifices people are willing to make in its absence. Unrequited love was a hard pill for you to swallow, so you chose to swallow a bullet instead. I still feel your absence every single day.

You should be here. You should be alive. You should be happy, healing the world one heart at a time with that contagious laugh and goofy smile. You should be someone by now. Not a pile of ashes sitting in an urn on your parent’s mantel. You should be here, loving the ugliness right out of this place with every God particle of that oversized heart. You should be here, but you’re not.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re at peace.

I hope your heaven is so beautiful,

it brings you to your knees.

And I hope wherever you are,

you know

that I’m still writing.

I’m still writing.

You are still here,

through me.