Sixteen Our Time Together

Sixteen

It was when I was sixteen that I had learnt what death was. It was at the hospital. I saw my best friend, Grace Fairfield's stone cold body laid on a stretcher covered by a thin green sheet. I didn't dare to look at her face that was demented and held no figure of her.

I was in an empty room with Grace. Cold and unemotional. I heard clear sounds of her mother in the corridor wailing and screaming but they soon muffled out like I was in water as I stared out at her hidden body. Her right hand laid out of the green sheet with her scars of stitches on her two fingers. The nurse and doctor had explained that her index finger and middle finger were ripped off at the moment of the incident . Grace Fairfield was killed instantaneously by an irresponsible drunk truck driver that had hit her father's car head to head.

It was the first time I saw someone dead. Even now I remember the temperature of her skin and the silence in the room that took me to an infinite time zone. I felt the hour repeat forever in the room of her body laying lifeless.

It was at her funeral I realized that I had died too. It was when her friends and family were reading their eulogy. Everyone cried and mourned her death during the funeral. I thought I would by the time her casket would be carried out but I remained neutral on the outside for the whole thing. I read my eulogy to her without a choke or even a tear but a stiff voice that spoke monotously. I couldn't cry. I couldn't cry even after the funeral. I couldn't accept her death.

I guess even after all these years. I still can't.

We lived in a small town where there was no privacy. I was told to be a cold-hearted friend. "Not even a drop." They continuously said.

I never felt so lonely.

She was sunlight to me. She took me out of my tunnel of loneliness and was my best friend. But she wasn't there at the time when I was truly divorced from the world. When I needed her the most.

At eighteen, I left the small town. I couldn't stand being there any longer. I was desperate to leave for a place where no one knew me. I ranaway as fast and far as I could. I got into a university in New York was accepted a job at an advertising agency after graduating with a degree.

I now work quietly at the office five times a week for ten to eleven hours a day. This is my tenth year since I have been honorably accepted here with great colleagues and a fiancé I met two years ago.  In this big city, no one minds your business. That made everything easier.

But Grace Fairfield never left my mind.

If I confess, Grace was my first love. The first time I met her was in my first year of junior high, not much later than the entrance ceremony. It was after school at the library. I was looking for a novel that I enjoyed reading before that I never got to finish. The library was empty. I found out within the first week that no one but the cleaner entered the library. While everybody made friends, I was too busy being an introvert. One afternoon, I found the novel in the library and reached my hand out to it, but at the same time a small hand reached out for the book too. I remember jumping back from the sudden appearance of a small girl and hitting my elbow hard against the shelf. "Is this like the scene where a couple meets and fall in love in romance films?" She said with her eyebrows raised with a big smile on her face. She didn't care about how hard I hit my elbow on the shelf and watched me fall down to the ground. I realised that she's the popular girl in my class.  "You're Charlie right? Charlie Goodman?" She asked. "Yeah." I replied uncomfortably and disturbed to find out she knew my name while I rubbed my hurt elbow that was bruised green the next day. "I'm Grace Fairfield," She took out her hand. I took her hand and got back up on my feet. I looked down at her eyes that looked into mine glowing beautifully green in the rays of the afternoon light. "at your service." She giggled as she did a bow a princess would make in picture books. It was probably the first time I smiled that month.

From that moment, I had been swollen in to her world that never seemed to have boundaries. Her free, uninhibited personality and actions spun my world one hundred eighty degrees, to theotherside of the world I would've never seen without her. She was freedom itself.

And I loved her.