I am trying to wrap my brain around the fact that you are gone. I've experienced death in my lifetime more than a few times, but it's your loss in particular which sticks. To contemplate the fact that you are not here, for someone so full of life and living and promise. Someone with so much passion and yet so much anguish and pain that you endured in the short time you were upon this planet, and how you somehow managed to get beyond such things and find love. You were the example of poetry that I would use, of transforming something of grief into something of wild beauty and joy. If I were to sit down and discuss with another all the elements of a tragic beauty, you would be it. To even frame such things in past tense does not make sense to me at all - there's a displaced quality to it all where in quiet moments (I find these come when I am motion, be it dance or walking along with my headphones on, or on the bus) I'll think of you and the fact that not too long ago, you closed your eyes and this time you did not open them. The mere fact that your physical being does not exist, and that you are wisps of smoke and ashes scattered about, and how I'd tell your little sister over and over again throughout this all that your soul is intact, and I so believe that, but that I wish it was present, in the here and now, in living flesh with laughter. You reminded me of all the great laughter - the kind that isn't polite or as courtesy, but the one that would make you double over and howl and roll on the floor unable to breathe because you'd be so full of joy. Imagine that, that you had the kind of charm to suffocate people, and we never minded it whatsoever. I am trying to understand how someone so beautiful and sensual and playful and sexy who had no inhibition and the mind of a genius (who else could get into Harvard while in a coma? Only you could do that, you know) is not here.
(Where did you go?)
I've been sick on some level since you died. I haven't really recovered fully just yet, and though I'm the tower of strength for everyone, in your last days you taught me that I should allow myself to be more vulnerable, and that the only way to truly be strong is to admit it when you're hurting, so I'm hurting. And now that I've admitted that, I think it's also a good thing to tell you that you've lit a fire under my ass in the best possible of ways. I know I've been ill and ailing and that physically I haven't felt myself for weeks since you first became ill, and that the majority of this summertime has been spent either lying in bed or at my job, but that I'm assuring you in the here and now that when I'm feeling stronger (and I will be feeling stronger) that promise I made to you before you died I will absolutely keep, and that I promise you that you will not be forgotten, and that there is a wealth of surprises to share with the world that will have your name, or your impression attached to them, and that I'll do your memory justice with what is being offered, and that even in death, you will still always be one of the most beautiful souls I will have ever encountered, and that I'm so glad that we met when things were absolutely rough for you, and that I had the pleasure of helping you do what you ultimately did on your own, and that's move forward. I'll move forward for you, and I'll keep watch over your sister and give her all the love and attention I can give, and I'll relearn how to dance, and I'll build that school, and I'll repair and heal and love. I'll remember my priorities and make sure that as I transition into a new phase of my life, when I stretch out in my new space and begin to move again, somewhere you'll be around, and though it's a negative thing usually to imply a haunting, I hope you're around, you prankster girl, to play with me every chance you get.
You were lovely, and you are lovely, and I'll miss you, beautiful, but not enough to hide away from the world and withdraw and forget. For you, I'll remember myself. I promise.
