Gone, Not Forgotten

elegy for Kyle

When I first heard the news, the ricocheting bullet, it was as if time came to a stop as the words went through me, leaving me biparted, split in half, with a wound that won't heal, in a room I had made for you. Unable to fill the empty silence of night which echoes through every fraction of the canyon abyss, the void with no answers. I couldn't believe it then, and a part of me still can't swallow the pill, or wrap my head around the prospect that it's too late to unlearn the grief, too late to say goodbye. It's strange how our paths crossed, how we met at the point of fate, to think about how things could have been, how I'm here with remnants of your sparkle, how you live on in my mind, and from time to time I think about you, wondering how you must have felt in the last moments of your life, wishing I could've done more but I never got the chance. Now you're gone and I can't forget your smile suspended in the perpetual morning sky.