Soulless

Fourty Three | To my dearest friend

Lunden Evergreen
2 months later

"For the short time I knew Verena it wasn't time wasted. A bright and brilliant young mind, someone who loved and cared deeply for others," I felt like my words weren't coming out right as every face in this cold and dark lit church made me feel more numb.

Meeting your best friend's absent family on the day of her funeral was never what you expect. But neither being told I was to give the eulogy forty minutes before. Especially after being the one she died for.

The room swarmed with people who knew her and half who didn't. But you didn't need to know Verena to know she was a good person. The stories that were told and passed on are truth in itself.

I don't know if we are promised a life after this one. If we'll see each other again or if that day was our last. That maybe I did break one promise to her in this life. But I choose to believe she'll see me again and we'll be together.

Maybe we won't be dancing in the kitchen or planning on how to take on the world. Maybe it'll just be us catching up somewhere someday far away and we'll have each other. I saved her once before but this time she saved me.

Like she promised.

That she would protect me with her life if it came down to it. I wish we could go back to those weeks with just us. Because I don't know what I'm supposed to do, I'll be haunted by the ghost of her memory.

Nobody knows what to say to you when your best friend dies. I've been told that two times in my life and that was too many. I knew Eleanor was here, somewhere in this crowd and when I stepped up on that stage.

I found her in the sea of people with a ghostly expression. Some people who saw me here this afternoon, figured me dead. Sometimes I picture Verena alive and on the run to keep me at peace.

But now she was in a coffin behind me at her delayed funeral. We had to wait for her family to fly in from Germany, the ones I knew so little about. She didn't seem to have a relationship with them, but even so. Finding out your child is dead is unimaginable. So they had to be here, they made that firm with me on the unexpected phone call.

So then being in front of them, having my own ideas with her family. I didn't feel that much sorrow for them. Because they were no longer in her life but demanded to be included in her death. As if they were always around, but Atlas mentioned something about it. He said she had said something off putting about them.

So I wouldn't let today be about them and their grief. It would be about Verena and her death.

"Verena's family vision was not what you'd think it to be. Verena found family not only in her blood but the ones she loved. She once told me I was her platonic soulmate, I still believe that. She died saving my life and it's not something I could give back to her. She is...." I felt my words caught in my throat as I try to keep it together

"She was... a hero and gave me my life back in the end," I almost couldn't breathe up here and I felt my hands begin to shake fidgeting with a paper I wasn't even reading off of.

A hand touches my shoulder and Atlas stood. His arm wrapped around mine to steady me as I faced this crowd. The tears that left my eyes were long lasting. The words that flew out of my mouth with them. Then I'm met with my final words, my last goodbye.