It’s been a year today. I know that because it comes so twistedly natural to count the days, the sun that sets on each night bringing up the moon’s song where I sit and stare into the dark reaching out for that familiar weight on my lap. The feeling of my fingers trailing through your sun-bleached, honeyed hair, the fingers now forever stained in blood that couldn’t be washed away.
In another world, our roles are reversed… you are the one who survived and I am nothing but a half-remembered gravestone. I come alone. I always come alone. No one remembers you and I like to think you’d like it that way. You were always a quiet soul, now your soul lies in the air mingling with the mortal presence. The curved grey stone sat there planted in the ground, mocking me – taunting me with your name and the sickening realization that you were gone.
You could have been a father in another life, though you never saw past fifteen; still, there was so much care in you that rooms swelled with warmth. And I hate myself for thinking it, for measuring the world in what you never got to be.I stand there counting the years you were denied as if they could somehow be transferred, as if I could lay them at the foot of your grave and make the balance fair. But time does not barter. It only takes.
It took you quietly, and left me loud with breath and blood and the obligation to keep going.Sometimes I wonder if you would forgive me for that—if you would tell me that survival is not betrayal. But the stone does not answer, and the silence feels deliberate. I press my palm into the cold curve of your name, finally touching what I have spent a year avoiding, and the chill climbs my arm like a warning. You are not here to absolve me. You never were.
So I leave pieces of myself instead: fingerprints in the dust, knees aching in the grass, a voice that cracks when I say your name one last time. I walk away lighter only because I have learned how to carry the weight better, not because it has lessened. You stay behind, unchanged, while I continue on with the guilt of being the one who was allowed to grow older. turn away from the grave and immediately regret it, because walking away has always been my greatest skill.
The gravel shifts beneath my feet, loud in a way I do not deserve, and I think of how quietly you left, how the world barely noticed the space you stopped occupying. I tell myself I come here to remember you, but the truth curls uglier in my chest: I come here to punish myself for still being capable of leaving. Each step feels like a theft. Each breath feels borrowed. If I stand still long enough, maybe the ground will decide I have overstayed my permission too.I replay the moments I have already exhausted—every almost, every not-enough, every time I chose comfort over courage and told myself it did not matter. I catalogue them like sins because they are easier to carry when numbered. I wonder if you felt alone at the end, and the thought tightens until it feels like confession.
I was alive. I was nearby. I was busy becoming someone who got to remain. There is no version of this where that does not feel like fault.The stone behind me holds your name with more loyalty than I ever managed. It stays. It keeps its promise. I think of all the ways I failed to do the same. Survival has made me greedy—I hoard days, I make plans, I imagine a future that does not ask your permission. Every small happiness feels like an act of disrespect, like laughing in a language you were never taught.
I carry your absence into rooms where it does not belong and then resent it for following me, as if it were not invited by my own pulse.I want forgiveness, but I want it without having to deserve it. I want you to tell me that staying alive was not a decision, that it was not something I chose instead of you. But the dead are not responsible for comforting the living, and you have already given more than you were allowed. The silence does not soften. It waits.So I leave again. I always do. I walk away with my hands empty and my chest full, rehearsing apologies no one can hear. Tomorrow I will wake up older, and you will not, and that imbalance will be mine to explain for the rest of my life. If there is an afterlife, I hope you never learn how much of mine I took with me when I stayed.
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