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To Honour the Memory of Them

to those taken from us far too soon

TW: grief, death, and consequent feelings of depression

A/n: this is a dead dove: do not eat situation, I don't describe much in detail, in fact, not even the grief that comes along with dealing with death...by all means I haven't been affected by death a lot, but a definite trigger warning for you who have

word count: ~1k words

p.s.: I was inspired to write the following by this inkskinned poem and one of Mike Shinoda's songs following the suicide of Chester Bennington

p.p.s.: If you're still interested after all that, this can be read as both Anthoine and Jules. I mean no disrespect to their families by this. In the end this is supposed to be an exploration of grief as I have experienced it.

It was a Saturday, an exceptionally nice August Saturday, and you had to study all weekend. You were stuck in a stuffy flat in Monaco while your friends and boyfriend enjoyed the sun.

They were stuck working out and keeping up the physique their jobs required them to have, but they had surely found a way to make it fun. How you longed to be with them, playing beach volleyball together and turning every other imaginable activity into a competition. That's how they were; none of them could stand to lose to the others.

But alas, you were stuck trying to memorise—you had given up on trying to understand—the course work given to you by your professors.

You were, in fact, so enveloped in it that you didn't notice the apartment door unlock and creak open, nor the kettle's hiss.

You only became aware of your boyfriend's presence when he placed a steaming teacup, smelling deliciously, down next to you and kissed your temple. You leaned into his warmth for a second before whispering out a small Je t'aime, mon amour.

Race weekends sometimes took quite a toll on you, especially when it meant your boyfriend was stuck somewhere on the other side of the world.

People told you "home is where the heart is" too many times for you to count. You knew it to be true; you had given yours to him for safekeeping a long time ago, before you had even started dating. So when he was away, living the dream he had dreamt up as a child, he took your home with him.

Monaco was merely where you two had chosen to take up residence, and it didn't feel complete without him; sometimes you saw his face on people in the streets, saw him in the loving eyes of a man observing his lover, saw him in the hands wrapped protectively around waists and shoulders.

And yet, every time you turned around for a second glimpse, he was gone. Not by your side, but a phone call and a late night away.

It sounded cheesy whenever you told your friends about it; sometimes they even laughed about it, but you two sent poems to each other, little exclamations of love you found endearing.

Some of them you found on Twitter—you would never tell him, but you had started following some accounts for that exact purpose—and some of them had come from your hand, expressed a little sloppily, but a poem nonetheless. Rupi Kapur would have been proud of you; they came straight from the heart.

Most of his poems were not his own creations, but you heard them in his voice every time you read them. Whispered into your ear when you were half asleep, lulling you even deeper.

They were what kept you sane when he couldn't be with you, or you with him.

Your boyfriend didn't have a particular smell; no fragrance he chose to dab onto his neck and wrists. He smelled mostly of laundry and sweat. But you loved it that way; he smelled like home to you.

His t-shirts and hoodies gave you comfort when he was away, and the smell of him that seeped into your sheets from how often he slept over made you sleep easier.

His clothes and toothbrush in your apartment were a promise—a promise to come back and a promise to stay.

Until he didn't, until he didn't come back, until he would never sleep in your bed again. You wept uncontrollably at his funeral, inconsolable even as his mother wrapped her arms around your frame.

The tea you made, the streets you wandered, the poetry you read, the bed you slept in—it all reminded you of him. You stopped drinking tea, stayed cooped up in your apartment, didn't read poetry anymore, and couldn't sleep in your bed any longer.

In fact, his absence had seeped so deeply into the very fabric of your being that you couldn't sleep at all.

Everything reminded you of him, and you couldn't handle it. You couldn't stand seeing Charles and Pierre, couldn't stand watching the races, couldn't stand to stay in neither Monaco nor France any longer. Your education be damned.

You sought out professional help at the pleading of your mother, who couldn't stand to watch her child waste away. It was like walking through hell all over again—replaying the memories on loop and having to live through them over and over again.

And at times you felt like you couldn't breathe; your home and heart had been taken from you. You couldn't believe anyone who said it would get easier; their path ahead hadn't been set ablaze with no way out but through. They hadn't had blisters on their feet before they even started the trek.

But therapy helped; you could face Charles and Pierre again. Could fall into their arms, could depend on them to catch you. Could visit the cemetery and cry until there were no more tears to shed.

And soon the tea you made started to taste like tea again, not like you had brewed the very essence of him into it.

You could visit Charles in Monaco again and walk the streets of Monte Carlo with him.

The poetry you read started to sound less and less like he whispered it into your ear.

Your sheets smelled like fabric softener and fresh mornings; no longer did the smell of him cling to the mattress like it had soaked in a part of him.

You could finally sleep without waking up a complete mess again, but there were still nights when it got too much. When you called your friends and family while sobbing hysterically, but they got less and less.

And yet, you said goodbye to him with every cup of tea you drank, every face you saw him in, every poem you read, and every time you washed the sheets. You could and would never forget him—moving on had seemed impossible, but you continued on and honoured his memory by living.

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