The Tower

Like many others, my life is shaped by changes made within it, whether I had a say in them or not. With change happening often, I find myself lost in nostalgia, who I was and who was around me. I say that’s mainly due to the loss I had to go through at such a young and moldable age. Losing a close friend of mine when I was sixteen felt detrimental, because it was, but also because while I had dealt with grief plenty in my lifetime, it had never happened to someone who was a constant in my daily life, nor had it happened to someone so young. Grief has a way of twisting the past, and with the help of nostalgia, I was not grieving someone I knew but grieving that I would never know them any better. People have their sayings: grief is love with no place to go, or grief gets smaller, but it’s still there, even if you aren’t constantly feeling it. You can not ignore grief; it’s there when you’re sad, but even more so when you are happy, when you’ve done something that the other would find amusing, when someone says something only the two of you have ever talked about. In your wins, when you realize that the people around you are great, but that person being there would be better, you would feel more accomplished, more whole. I felt there was no comfort in my grief; nobody knew the person I did. They knew their own version. My therapist often said that while I may not have known them the best or the longest, I did know them even for a moment of my life, however short, they made a difference, and so did I. Often people will tell you when you lose someone that you should see them one last time, I think that should be a personal choice of course, nobody can decide to live that moment for you, but as a precursor, they will not be who they were. They will be dead. Obvious to most until you are there, looking at someone who once took up space, deflated and cold. For my first time writing this seems morbid, and even more so TMI, but for those who have ever had to go through grief no matter how big or small, may understand that this moment was the biggest moment of my life, and I am afraid that no matter how big or small of a change I make in my life I will always be the sixteen year old standing at the edge of my dead friends coffin fighting the very urge to call out to him as though it was a cruel joke.