Page 66 of The Night We Met

Kamryn

“It’s in the quiet I miss you most. When my mind has the chance to wander and my heart has a moment to remember.”

-Lola Lawrence

Shock

As the phone falls from my hand, my body goes numb as countless memories of us together fly through my mind. Every memory in chronological order. To our first meeting. To puberty changes. To both of us celebrating each other getting our licenses and then our first cars. To graduating high school and going to college together. To falling in love. To the last time I walked away.

Is it all gone? Are we no longer able to create new memories? Ones where we loved loud and forgave with quiet whispers and sneaking kisses. Is it really all gone? To the future I thought we’d have. To the love that I had hoped would last our lifetime.

The hope that I carry tries to say lit. I try to stay hopeful.

But the hope dims out as I pray to whoever is listening that this is all a bad dream. That I’m going to wake up. That Liam is going to be the one to call me.

But all of the hoping and praying slips through my fingers as I see Emily barely holding on. Her sobs overtaking her body as the realization that her fiancée is gone.

I don’t remember the drive in the car or the walk up to the hospital. As the memories of us refuse to stop playing as a montage.

I don’t remember anything as the doctor tells us they didn’t make it. My crumbling to the floor as the life I had imagined with the boy I’d known since I was seven is ripped from my grasp. The hope that I carried is snuffed out with the realization that this is the reality I’m living. As the tears that I hoped would stop just fall faster as time ticks on.

I don’t remember Jax coming to pick Emily and I up from the hospital and taking us back to my house. Silent sobs wrack my body as the soul deep ache of losing the other part to your being starts to sink in.

I don’t remember any of it. I don’t want to remember any of it.

It’s as if a stunt double played me while I looked on. Even though I lived it. I have the emptiness inside of me to prove it.

Five days pass me by. I lived but I didn’t exist. Because I knew that as this day approached, existing would be the last thing on my mind.

There is a light knock on my door as Jax sticks her head inside my bedroom. My sister and Sarah have been my saving grace through it all.

“Kam it’s almost time to go,” Jax announces from my closed bedroom door.

I’m in a motionless state. I don’t remember anything that’s happened in the last week. I don’t remember waking up or getting dressed for the funeral. And I don’t even remember the drive to the church where the funeral is being held.

“I’ll be right here the whole time,” Jax tells me as she holds my hand and leads us to sit near Liam’s family.

I wish I could hit the rewind button to last week. How has it only been five days? It hits harder the closer and closer we get to our seats. I just want to go back. To when I didn’t give him that ultimatum. Where I made him tell me his reasoning for breaking his promise. Where I just gave him more time. Time to prove to me that we weren’t just settling into a domestic partnership. Time to realize that we could’ve had it all. Time is ungraspable at the moment when your whole world is crumbling down around you.

Time and the what if crush me as I realize that at the end of the day, none of it truly mattered.

As I sit in the church with trembling lips and silent tears running down my face; I can’t help but hate myself for the way that I handled things with Liam. Maybe he was more fragile than I thought. Maybe he was suffering from depression. How could I have not seen it?

Guilt

I wanted to be a psychologist for crying out loud! The self-hatred for myself that I couldn’t see his struggles, slaps me in the face. I should have seen it.

I failed him.

I feel like I have this giant Liam-shaped hole in my heart at what I lost with him. All that Liam’s family had lost.

The reverend talks about how precious life is. And how every day on this earth is a gift that should never be wasted.

As we get to the cemetery and settle in our seats, family members of his whom I never met tell stories of a boy who was nowhere close to matching what they described about him. Liam’s parents were looking at me expectantly when it was time for me to give the last speech. Jax gives my hand a reassuring squeeze before I stand up and walk to the front.

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”

–Leo Tolstoy

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