My mouth wouldn't close because the emptiness and loss were pushing their way to escape me first. Uncontrollable gasps of disbelief were pouring out of my lips. “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” I hoped it had been a joke, I would show up to chem and there he would be laughing in his suit. He wasn't. He never will be.
   We drove to school and I looked out the window, we were driving along the path he took every day. I hid my face in my dress to muffle the sobs. Attempting to clear my eyes enough to see him, because he had to be there. He had to be there. He wasn’t there.
   I sat in a room hearing the soft but consistent sound of crying. I sat in a room and watched my best friends sob. I sat in a room and listened to people talk about the lowest point in their lives. I sat in a room and heard again and again and again “I wish I had known him better” “I knew him but I didn't know him”. I sat in a room and promised myself I would know all of them. I sat in a room and decided I will never let us sit in that room, hearing those sounds, feeling that feeling, sensing that absence, ever again.Â
   Wednesday I had ice cream for breakfast and dinner. Calories don't feel like they count when you're grieving. Selfishly thinking the whole human biology stops and understands pain, but science is insensitive.
   I cry in Ashlie’s living room while everyone else laughs about things my ears can’t seem to hear. Distraction is not how I cope. It is how I lose track of my humanity.
   Thursday a sub read his name while taking roll. Every syllable hit me. I heard silence and then a chorus of voices saying he's absent. It fell from their lips as if it was a goodbye they never had a chance to give.
   It feels wrong to laugh and smile. I sit in a room with one body missing, it is instead 6 feet below the ground that we so often forget is also a ceiling. The body of a boy I know. Of a boy I knew.
   It would have been different if it was an accident. If a car had hit him as he rode home on his bike. There's no question that way. We can label it sad but bearable, we can continue. There is a rule book, a procedure. There is a graspable understanding, solid fact. There doesn't need to be a why. An accident pushes not stabs, it yells not screams,  it slows but it does not derail.  An accident does not require you question the victim. An accident can leave someone to forgive. Suicide doesn't. Suicide kills two people but only leaves one body. The life taken and the one who took it both buried in the same grave. Suicide leaves behind more pain than it could ever take away.
   It is so vile that we were given the ability to take away our own lives. It is disgusting that we can hate ourselves so much. It is so dark. It must have been so dark. It was a cloudy day. I was sick but in school, everyone was there labeling him as absent assuming he was sick or not really thinking about it at all. They had no idea the three miles away he lay dead with a note beside him saying he loved his family and his cat. We just thought he was sick. I guess he was.
   When we got there the sides of my lungs begin to restrict, my heart beats against my chest warning me, I shake and stumble up steps to a building holding his body and people worshipping something outwardly resembling my God. I saw pictures of a smiling boy, one who still had control of his body. Air still in his lungs. Oxygen in his veins. Hope left somewhere.
   I catch a glimpse of his coffin. It takes so many people to carry. I still can't figure out how something so empty could weigh so much. Just a wooden box housing embalmed flesh, still veins, an empty mind void of hope.  I learned that hope is not what is heavy but it is the things hope must carry that weigh the most.
   Afterward, I stood there, just stood there. Arms reached around my exhausted body from time to time and words of forced repetitive sorrow brushed past my ears occasionally. Then we followed the police guided burial procession led by my history desk partner.
   There is something so confusing about mourning the victim with the one who took the victim's life. It is confusing how they can be the same person. He is dead. The only goodbye we will ever give is one he will never hear. Goodbye is at times, more for the person who is left behind.
   Grief still tumbles out of our mouths at unexpected moments, hoping with all we have he will respond. He won’t. He has left a reminder of the emptiness someone can replace themselves with, but also of the wholeness that can be maintained through hope.
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