Last summer I realized how valuable life is. People always say “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone,” and unfortunately I was a victim to that statement. Well I wouldn’t exactly call myself a victim by any means. I’m not the one who died.

In early September  a lonely heart beat for the last time. A human being, a friend, a classmate, a teammate, a daughter, a sister.  It’s odd, you hear about death, it happens to everyone. You hear about the pain others experience from a single life taken, but you never fully understand it until someone near you takes  their last breath. At first it didn’t really hit me, I was on vacation when I heard. But I think reality has a way of moving in slow motion during new experiences. Well this definitely was a new experience.

A few years ago I took an art class, you know, something I didn’t really care to take but it was required. I sat in the back of the room at a cold gray table that was sort of shaped like a crooked rectangle. I remember the first day of that class, I really thought it was a bunch of bull that i had to take it, what would I need a few pointers on art for? Well anyway, the class went on. I sat at that crooked table with a few of my friends. So we started off the semester learning how to draw circles. Really, circles? Yeah it was total bull.After the circles we moved on to 3D boxes, shading and drawing them. I remember one of my friends couldn’t quite grasp the method of drawing a simple box, it was sort of funny.  Of course we moved on and studied some old people that influenced art, and we did some design stuff, nothing extremely drastic. Towards the end of that semester we were scheduled to have Arts day, a day basically giving students a free ride to do whatever they want. That art class happened to be my homeroom as well. I came in on a cloudy, chilly day completely unaware of what I was going to walk into. I sat down and started to talk to my friends just like any other day. I knew we had been in homeroom for a while and wondered why class was being delayed. Then the principal came onto the loudspeaker and told the student body that a classmate had passed away the previous night. I stared at that crooked table and contemplated how crooked life was. Nobody really knew how to react or what to say because it was new to all of us. Little did I know that it wouldn’t be the first time I would have a classmate die. Anyway, the year continued just as if nothing had happened, as horrible as that sounds. Lives went on and people gradually moved forward. 

But that isn’t really what this specific paper is about. I know every death is tragic and just blatantly sad and it’s horrible that people have to experience such an event. I figure by now you get the point that I’m going to be writing about the loss of a friend so I’m just going to get to the point. Isn’t that what life is about anyway, getting to the point? Well I went to Tennessee this past summer with my family. It was actually a pretty s***ty vacation if you ask me, countless hours of bickering and anger. But of course, I thought things couldn’t get worse, and you know what, they did.
I remember it was the third day on vacation. It was a muggy day and I had just gotten back from a hiking trail. We were in the mountains so I didn’t have any service until I got back to the cabin and I really wish I hadn’t gotten service at all. All of the sudden my phone was blowing up with text messages and phone calls and I didn’t know where to start so I called my closest friend at the time and asked her what was  going on. We aren’t friends anymore but that’s another story you already know the end of. Your typical ‘people come and go’ happy ending, although it’s not happy. It’s just an ending, like everything else. Well anyway I called her and she asked me to talk in private. We just kinda talked and I heard the words coming out of her mouth and I knew what she was saying but I couldn’t quite grasp what she meant when she had said our friend took her life last night. It felt surreal and bizarre. I couldn’t really process the rest of that phone call so consequently I hung up. I sat on the edge of the white sheets on the left bed in that guest room. It was sort of crooked, that bed. After that phone call I never slept in it the same way, man I guess I never really slept the same way since then regardless of where I am.

She will never graduate. She won't walk down with her classmates and smile as her parents tell her how proud they are. Maybe that’s the problem, maybe they never did tell her. I don’t know, I guess I’m just shooting in the dark but there’s gotta be a method to the madness, you know? I don’t believe that people are inferior, I don’t believe people do things without a reason. I mean look at me, I’m writing this because I needed to write a paper about something passionate. I’m typing this in the smallest sized font possible so that people don’t see that I’m writing my prompt on a teenager that was the victim to the cruel society that we live in. It’s all for a reason. She had a reason, and now she is a reason. She’s a reason I played lacrosse when I didn’t really know anyone. She’s a reason for her sister to try harder, do better. She’s the reason I’m writing this paper. I could have wrote on any subject but I didn’t want to, someone should hear her voice even if it stopped making noise.

Nearly nine months have passed and there hasn’t been a day to go by that I haven’t felt pure remorse. It’s sort of funny you know, pain and love. You can’t reach out and touch it but it’s the most tangible experience known to man. It’ll kill you, you know.

I don’t even think she ever learned how to draw that box either.