who we were.

1:1

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YOUR NAME was Elliot Hanley.

You died on the twenty-second of January, two-thousand and sixteen. Today is the twenty-second of January, two-thousand and sixteen.

There are only two things I know about you:
your name and your death date; Elliot Hanley and today.

I know you go to my school, too. But that's not really a fact about you - more a predisposition. We have English together. Well, had. We never spoke, never sat near each other. Never talked. You had your group of friends, and I had mine. At least, that's what I thought.

The whole school is at your vigil today.  Funny, because just yesterday were you around the halls alone and eating lunch with only your Calculus Prep textbook as a companion.

I could have said a simple 'hi.' to you. We could have made small talk. I could have made you smile. Hell, anyone could've made you feel better, even if was just a bit. A little goes a long way, right?

My fingers pick at an unravelling thread of my sweater. I pull the string in taut loops over my finger, tight over my skin. Try to feel the pain you felt. But death is no more painful than existing. Those with a beating heart can cry. But with lungs filled with water and lungs filled with everything but air, to weep is impossible.

It is not pretty, it is ugly, and it hurts, and you and I both know it.

Someone, someone who apparently knew you well, is talking about how you liked your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with grape jelly and crunchy peanut butter. Did they know you preferred dying, too? Or was that not as simple of a concept as sandwich preferences for them to understand? I tug hard on the thread. Red string piles into my fingers in kinked coils. The hole in my sleeve flaps and gapes in the wind, my skin vulnerable to the cold. Yet I am not.

I wonder if that's how it felt like for you. Unravelling. Tugging at all your loose ends until you were nothing whole.

Someone else is speaking about you now. I don't want to hear it, though. I don't want to know who Elliot Hanley was. He was beautiful. He was truly a gifted soul. You were this, and you were that.

But you are dead. You are Elliot Hanley, and you are dead.

Your vigil was held first period this morning. The rest of the day is not silent, but it is slow. Teachers sit at their desks, staring at the one worksheet left over for you. Students sit at their desks, craning their necks to your empty seat every few seconds as if, somehow, you'd appear out of thin air, alive and well. Happy, even.

The day is familiar for some.

I don't think you had a girlfriend. But as I pass a group of girls in the hallway before lunch, I catch them murmuring about how 'hot' you were, and what a loss it is that you are not here anymore.

What a shame it is that you weren't there to hear it.

My memories of you are slight - where you sat in our English class, how I sometimes saw you carrying an instrument in a case in the hallways (a viola, I learnt today), that you always parked your car one Mazda and one four-wheel drive to the left of mine.

Someone else took your parking spot today. A flashy sports car. I flipped the finger at them this morning. But they couldn't see me.

Cars come and go. People come and go. You go. But you don't come back.

Your car is down with you in the sea.

I drive alone today. As usual. But the day isn't usual. Because Elliot Hanley died today. Exactly two years and one day after me. There are too many candles at school today, too many unread messages left at our lockers. It is a shame to watch them appreciate our existences after our death.

I pull over at the cliffside of the road, where you are waiting.

And we drive, around and around and around the whole town, with nothing left to do.

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