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Swearing in Sunday School.
This is just something I wrote, stream-of-conciousness style, to a girl I used to know. I felt like I sort-of have to post this, it's been swimming around in my head for a while now. Feedback appreciated.
The day I write this it has been six months, two weeks and one day since I last saw you, I mean really saw you. Not just in a photograph or your dress hanging up, only worn once. Not in your dearest friends whose eyes search for you, long for you each day. Not in the thousands of times I have been swept along by a crowd and have had to do a double take because I think I see you in it. And in those six months, two weeks and one day, I have thought about you. And I’ve wanted to tell you things, wanted to set things straight with you.
I would have visited you when you were sick. But I was out of town, and I honestly had no idea until a friend texted me and told me about you. And I swore and freaked out a little, because I’ve never known anyone that’s died, apart from old relatives who met me once or twice in my life. But, God, I would have visited you. I would have gone to your funeral. It’s not like I didn’t care. Please, please believe me. I would never want you to think that just because we weren’t good friends, I didn’t care. Because I did. More people did than you would think.
It’s funny. Even though they exalted you in church and told of how great a person you were, every word of which you deserved, I remember how you would swear in Sunday school, and do other things some members of our church would find…morally reprehensible. You lived fast, dangerously and sometimes immorally, but who didn’t? And even though you were rebellious and reckless, you were also fierce and real and down-to-earth, and God, do I miss it.
I regret that I didn’t get to know you better. I had so much time. You were always there, laughing and joking and breaking the rules. So close to me. I could have talked to you more, smiled at you more. I could have come your way so many times, but I was shy, or maybe lazy.
And now I’m stuck looking at that dress, that bright purple creation only you would have worn, every day, and it’s weighing me down with guilt. And I see your best friends with their hungry eyes, and I remember their brokenness. They try so hard to hide it but it’s still there. They didn’t expect it. Did you expect it? How could you?
And where does that put me? I mourn you in my own way. You come to my mind almost every day. Your smile, your dirty mouth, your different-colored hair. Those things are burned into my mind forever. Do I even have the right to be so sad, since I never took the chance to know you better? That question, no matter what anyone says, will still be there, and it will never go away.
I mean, you didn’t even get to graduate high school. Where is the fairness in that?
At the end of all this, I realize I have not set anything straight at all.
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Valerie. Theatre owns my soul. I read. OBSESSIVELY. I'd be nothing without my best friends in the world. "Storm clouds may gather, and stars may collide..."
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