Sometimes I’ll just be going about my day and there will be this sudden recognition of your absence. It becomes hard to breathe for a moment. Time stops.
I’ll see a mid-twenties kid with a crew cut and imagine him as you. I sit outside in the quiet and feel the wind brush up against me and remember what it’s like to be alive. I remember what it’s like to be the one between us that still exists.
I try to imagine what you would be doing if you were still here. I try to imagine the shape our relationship would have taken if it had been allowed the space and time to keep growing. I think of the things I wish I could ask and tell you. Sometimes I’ll say them out loud so they don’t have to go unspoken. I hate to admit it but I wonder if you’re listening somehow. If the wind carries you within it.
Can you feel me? I still think of you constantly—I see it as a secret betrayal if a day goes by that I don’t. I imagine how you would have felt and grieved and grown if it had been me that had been killed and not you.
After two years, I wish I had some sort of clarity. Sometimes it still feels like I’m crawling around in the dark. Like there is pain inside of me that has sunk deep into my bones, that no time will ever soften. It only grows deeper with each day that I’m reminded of all the things in my life that I won’t ever be able to share with you. It only grows deeper when I remember that I don’t get to ever see you again.
The ocean of anger and helplessness still wells up inside of me. I still fight to not drown in it’s current. It still ebbs and flows the way it always has.
I still miss you as much as I always have. As I always will. As I always will have to.