A story a found luckily browsing through Tumblr. Brilliant!
I sat at the back, near the doors, squeezed in between your third grade maths teacher and a girl you spent three weeks with at camp when you were twelve. They are both crying. Everyone is crying. At the podium your mother is reading a poem you wrote. She took it from your journal. I think you would have hated that had you been here. Your inner most thoughts being read aloud. I guess there is no privacy in death.
It makes me squirm with discomfort to hear your words, to picture you lying in bed on your stomach with your legs crossed behind you, twirling a pencil in your hair. No one ever really writes like that though, except in movies.
In my mind your room is blue, a darker shade, like the deepest parts of the ocean. Blue like the sweater you wore almost everyday last fall. I overheard you saying that it was a present from your dad, from a trip somewhere in South America.
Your dad is here too. I think he would have liked me, had we met. I think he would have approved of a guy like me. He seems the type to appreciate a soft touch, a quiet word. Maybe if we had met in a few years, in college maybe, you would have appreciated those things too.
The whole school is here. Your friends are in a row to themselves at the front. They all look very pretty. They all have buns for some reason, loose buns piled up to the tops of their heads. I wonder if they talked about it before they came. About appropriate funeral hair styles.
I don’t know why I came here. I don’t deserve to shed tears for you, to mourn you with these people. The ones who know what color your room really is. But I can’t bring myself to leave just yet. Once I do it means it will be over and any lingering hope I once had, any thin delusion, will be gone.
And those little pieces of you that were mine will be gone. The sunlight in your hair during first period French, golden. The fading echo of your laughter as you passed me in hallways. And those sacred, precious times, those times immortalized in my memory, when your attention, for a few seconds, was directed at me. When my name rolled its way off your tongue, when your hand brushed my arm. When you saw me, for a while. I will never again have those moments to look forward to.
“Were you two close, dear?”
“No, not really, ma’am. I hardly knew her. I hardly knew her at all.”
