In Memory Of A Loved One

I still wake up in the morning thinking it was all a dream—one of those agonizingly slow dreams that you can’t bring yourself to wake up from. And then I open my eyes as the sun rises and it slowly dawns on me that you’re not coming back. So I close my eyes for five more minutes, praying that it will go away, begging that those last five minutes will bring more solace and less pain or more answers and less of the unknown.

I’d give anything for those five minutes to bring you back to me or just to have five more minutes left with you. But you only exist in my memories and the old photo albums that lay scattered across my bedroom floor.

Sometimes people come into your life and it’s so clear that they were meant for you. For some indescribable reason, you just work better together. Our lives are interrupted and our plans get changed, but we’re given these soulmates to soften the blows. In a world full of sin and devastation, I have never felt more alive than I did with you.

You don’t get to choose your family, but I always felt like on some unconscious level, I did. I believe it to be fate—not the blind fate that gives us no freedom of choice, but a fate that gives you all the power for potential and recreates a sense of hopefulness when all hope is lost.

As quickly as you came into my world, you were gone in the blink of an eye. And now I’m starting to realize that life is short—really short. It’s become clear to me that first times aren’t as important as last times.

The calories really didn’t matter. The dinner in the presence of good company really did. Final words are everything, because I can promise that I’m hanging on to every last word you said. For a long time, I was sad. I presume it to be the good kind of sadness, though. It was the type of misery that made me want to sing, write, and continue to live life with hopes that maybe someday, I would not feel as I do now. There were so many times that I tried to put into words what you meant to me. And for so long, I thought maybe it wasn’t sadness at all—maybe a piece of me left with you.

These past six months have taught me some valuable lessons. I’ve learned to spend more time with people I love and the people who love me. I now know 20 years can pass by faster than you think. My fear is that I don’t know how to live in a world without you. Maybe we’ll meet again when I’ve grown and my broken heart no longer yearns for yours when I wake. But right now, there’s a small, quiet place in the corner of my heart that belongs only to you.