Dear dead friend,
There was a profound hatred in me when you passed, though I lacked the sense to label it that at the time. It felt like sizzling to me in the moment— little fizzy bubbles that smoldered my flesh until they seared a hole big enough to pour out of.
I could not tell you exactly what I wanted dead, but I knew broadly that it was something. The trouble was deciding what. I felt as though almost everything was the blame for you, or rather the lack of you. It was the world who dared to spin without you. It was our other stupid friends asking me how I was holding up. It was you too. You for leaving me when you knew I so desperately needed you.
That made me feel chronically cruel because I knew it wasn’t really your fault or my friends or anyone else’s. And yet, I could not stop grasping at straws to keep hating. I had a gaping wound slashed by death himself and I couldn’t control who the blood of it spilled out on. Bandaids didn’t work on a wound that size.
So, I let it ooze because I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do. I still didn’t know if the puddle of red drowning me belonged to you or to me and, either way, I didn’t want to drain it. I didn’t want to flush any cut you gave me or any blood reaped from your body. How could I when it was the last thing you’d given me before you went? My cuts were from you and I wanted to keep them.
But our bodies don’t care what we want. There were red blood cells working, whether I liked it or not, that would stop me from resigning to my eternity of hatred and blame and staring at my hurt. They turned my blood into a scar, taking its warmth— your warmth— with it.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I was cold and lonely and missed you, but I‘d always been cold and I’d always been lonely and I’d always missed you. Very doubtfully was that anything new. All that really changed was that, slowly, I could see without sticky red dripping down from my lashes to blind me.
It was a bittersweet sight, having my eyes cleared. You weren’t there, I saw, but other people were and nature was and the world was. For some stupid reason, it took me that scene to realize that I hadn’t died with you. I was still here.
The idea was numbly okay.
Author’s Note:
I lost a friend in the summer after 8th grade and wrote a reflection piece on the healing process afterwards in the form of a letter.
Ginger Hester | 15 | South Carolina, USA | @gingerlywriting on Substack, @gingerly.writer on TikTok, @lostinafieldofflowers on YouTube
