Waves

A couple of months ago, someone very special to me passed away. I wanted to represent this sentence in a more eloquent way, but there is nothing beautiful about losing someone via death. It has been almost 5 months since that day and this is the first time that I've allowed myself to write about it. To be honest, I am still in half disbelief. No one ever thinks that it will happen to them. We hear about people dying way before they're supposed to, we hear of friends and acquaintances who experience the same kind of loss - but we never quite imagine that it would happen to us, not now, not so soon anyway.

Dying is supposed to be an old person thing. And we are young women, young people. We grew up together. We wrote notes to each other in class, we belted out Jay Chou songs at Kbox, we studied together at Starbucks. And even when we went on to do things separately, different universities, different friends, we were always meant to go through life together. We were supposed to graduate, go to grad school, start our first job, get married (or not), have kids (or dogs), whine about finances, the whole nine yards.

So I cannot believe that this is it. I am angry. I never told anyone this, nor have I expressed this in any way before. But I am angry. I wanted to be able to read your poems when you published them online. I wanted to be able to have that occasional crazy KTV meet up to sing all the same songs we used to sing. I wanted to be able to follow your career, to coo at your hypothetical babies, to see you at my wedding, gush about my new dog to you. And I'm angry that all this cannot be. I'm angry that I see myself being at the 30-35% mark of my life, and that you had already finished the whole race. I'm angry that we are never going to be old ladies laughing about the good old days.

I'm angry that I always assumed that we had all the time in the world to hold each other. In the last five months, any time someone mentioned you, I had to feign strength and composure. I've had to close windows and bump people off my social media to sandbag the incoming waves of grief. I know that the waves will never stop coming to shore. I miss you so much.