I See You

I see you, standing at the cash register, handing Mom her receipt. You're smiling wide, your voice tinted by your lisp.

I see you driving down the road, pausing to let me walk across the crosswalk to school, fingers drumming on the wheel.

I see you helping me with my homework, explaining algebra and the quadratic formula and somehow getting me to understand, even though I flunked last math class. I took the test the next day and got a B, somehow saving my grade.

I see you everywhere but where you should be. I see thousands of people, each face unique and different; but in all of them I see you. You’re in the smile exchanged in the grocery store, the cancer patient making everyone laugh. You are in the dancing at late-night high-school parties, always begging for one more. You are in the rain knocking on the door. You’re the one tapping my shoulder, vanishing when I look the wrong direction. 

You’re the one crying with your family at your own funeral.

You're the one in the box set up for viewing, your eyes closed, your hands folded on your chest. It’s you, but not you. You aren’t in that shell anymore. Because your smile is gone, overtaken by a stiff expression. Your scent is gone, replaced with chemicals and heavily scented lotions. I see glimpses of you but I can’t find you. I’ve drawn you a thousand times, covered our bedroom walls with photos of you. I’ve bundled up sheets and tucked them under the covers so I don’t feel alone at night.

We were two people blown by the wind, there for a moment, gone the next. For those breathless years –when I could still hug you, hold you–, we were best friends. Forever friends. Or so we thought. And then you were gone. Vanished. And you were never coming back, no matter how hard I tried.

Our paths intertwined for so long that now it feels like I’m unraveling, the one thread that was constant in my life having just withered. Died. I’m told I should make friends, that you wouldn’t want me to be alone. But you were my best friend, and part of me wonders if I could ever find a friend like you again. I still walk our favorite boulevard, wondering if the trees hold memories of whispered conversations. Secrets only two little girls could conceive were murmured there, never repeated outside the covering of those trees. We buried some there in boxes that now rot in the earth. My feet still follow our paths by memory, winding the ‘fairy paths’ that protected us from the dark.

I said goodbye at your funeral. But it was a meaningless, empty word that I rejected. Because I still haven’t let you go. That word has always scared me. There are too many goodbyes in life. At the time, I was numb to the idea of you leaving. You had said goodbye. I… refused to in my heart. Now I wonder if you ever knew that goodbye wasn’t enough for me. That goodbye hurt, carved another scar into my soul. I had watched others pass away at that point, and I had foolishly believed that with you it was different. That we were immortal, no matter what.

But you weren’t.

I’ve read your journal, tried to see you in the inked words. You stored up memories and emotions in those pages, but it’s still not you. Our parents say that you’re gone, that you’re happy somewhere else, somewhere beyond where I can’t follow. I know that. But it's hard to believe it.

It’s now been years since you died. I still see you everywhere. Therapists say that your death has scarred me in a way that I cannot be ‘fixed’. They say I see your ghost. And maybe that’s true. Because I can’t seem to stop looking for you, can’t seem to stop hoping that this is just some long game of hide-and-seek.

Over the years I’ve come to accept that you aren’t physically here. Because then I’d be able to touch you and you wouldn’t vanish. But I can sense you, that cheap perfume you love, and the smell of your toothpaste. The memories are everywhere, just as alive as when you were last here.

It’s hard to imagine how much I have changed since then. Ten years. You wouldn’t know me anymore if you saw me. My style has changed. Everything has. I wear clothes stitched with memories. Your favorite shirts have become mine.

They say that this is grief. I disagree. Grief is mourning. I mourned you once. Now… now I just follow you. I’ve moved many times, taken many jobs. I never stay in one place long, because I know that you wouldn’t have. You always wanted to travel the world. So that’s what I’m doing. Russia, France, Germany. Italy and Greece. South Africa and Brazil. I don’t stop. I see the sights you would have wanted to see. And because of you, it’s all beautiful to me.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever settle down. Or if I’ll drift along, just another torn piece of paper, just another unfinished story. I want there to be those two words, the end, somewhere in my story. But in my life, the end belongs in the middle. Because all my life it has been endings and beginnings. Beginnings followed by endings and endings followed by beginnings. You were the ending in my life. Something else began because of you. And… I’m still figuring out what that is.

I’ll make friends, but I know that they will never be what I had with you. I lost that carefree spirit a long time ago. Still, I know that that friendship, that sisterhood, is something I can’t forget. It shaped me to be who I am. You were my support during the rough patches in my life. And I’m better for it.

And that’s a truth that is hard to admit.