I didn’t go to his funeral.
Being as angry and guilt stricken as I was, I couldn’t find the strength to go. So I didn’t. I stayed at home, staring blankly at the wall with the TV playing reruns of Full House.
I couldn’t believe that he was gone, or make sense of the riddles that were words being told to me. Something about suicide- alcohol and pills. He must’ve downed a whole bottle of both, knowing him. People whispered about him in the halls when I passed for months. I was the girl whose best friend had committed suicide. Nobody cared. Nobody said anything to my face. They were cowards. I could have taken it.
The news had hit me like a train going 1,000 miles an hour, except trains don’t go that fast, and that would have killed me. And I wasn’t the one that was dead; Mason was. I can’t explain the feeling of emptiness that came over me that day. It was like all of the oxygen had been sucked from my body. Breathing was something I had to think about.
He’d left me alone.
Alone, and barely breathing, in a world where nothing made sense at all. Just like those nights I’d stayed up way too late contemplating the meaning of the universe and over-analyzing everything until absolutely nothing made any sense at all. That was everything at that moment in time.
I was alone, and angry, and scared, and nothing made sense, and it was all his fault. Or at least, that’s how I’d felt.
Mason died on a Thursday. He was eighteen.
He didn’t say goodbye.
I didn’t go to his funeral.
