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Concentrated silence is heavier than one would traditionally expect – it weighs like an anchor and makes the buoys in the sea sink, sink, sink. There is nothing to keep them afloat aside from the embraces of each other, but they have lost the feeling in their fingertips from the passing of a man they owed each and every single one of their lives to.
The room is empty save for this silence and those who perpetrate it – aligned with a casket with a lid tightly shut, flowers framing it and a worn-down mahogany podium set to the side. The candles splash against the darkened faces of the affected, and their hands are clasped together as their thoughts swim in the depths of sorrow.
Near the door, a girl sobs as she’s led away by good company – a redhead swathed in a smoky dress and a blond sniffling away and trying his hardest to refrain from blowing his nose into his sleeve. Mascara bleeds into tissues that she holds to her face. The girl’s traditional smile has been snuffed out completely, like the candle that she kept warm in trembling hands as her final words were given. A best friend, disappearing into the day like a wisp of wind – falling off into the distance, merging with the sunset. Her cries echo in the same way – they break the silence, if only temporarily. When the doors swing back shut, everything returns to the way it once ways – sans something important, something of greater value than anything that they had ever known.
Each candle is blown out as each person departs. They’re left upon a table near the doors, where the wax drips off the sides and crusts upon the surface. The final two that remain have come together in a pair – a dark-haired boy with a dark-haired girl at his side. Both have remained rather silent throughout the entirety of the vigil. Crescent moons lift to meet drifting petals – he gives her hand a firm squeeze, otherwise maintaining the reverential silence that presses down, down, down upon the room.
When the door finally clicks and the smoke wafts through the room, heels scuff against eroded tile. Worn fingertips graze the casket gently, tracing over the smoothed surface that had been polished not once, but twice. Embedded in the center is a rose, fleshed out and freshly blooming. A few petals are scattered around it, and a name is inscribed. Below, she pictures the face of the man who animates with mere words – he speaks and everything comes to life; he breathes and the world around him smiles softly in his wake. His heart was a font of creativity – his fingertips were the pens, and it flooded from him in steady flows rather than haphazard spurts. It led to the creation of something bigger – of something more than she or anyone else present at the ceremony could ever hope to become.
This font of creativity has stopped beating. It has stopped pumping ideas and effortlessly flinging them onto a blank slate, splashing it with colors that nobody ever knew existed until he thought of them. When her fingers dance along the surface of the casket, crafted of only the best for one of the best men that they had ever known, she can still feel the rhythmic thrum of a mind at work – of a spirit that is not a rest because there is so much to do, so much to see, so much to inspire.
A silk bow bobs as she kneels down. Her hands fold in front of her and she considers everyone who has been affected by the sheer power that this man has held in his mind for too short of a time. Words bubble at the back of her throat, like she wants to speak, to cry out, to beg for a return – but she is not naïve; she has witnessed the death of her family and friends. This man, while both, deserves more than what he has received. But he does not deserve the anguish of the men and women that he has impacted – he deserves the cherishing thought and the preservation of adoration, the note of inspiration, and a mimicking smile of creativity, all because that is the world that he wanted to create – no, she thinks, has created.
The flame sways gently at her side, nearly catches the hem of her dress. She picks it up after her reflection, curves her hand around the wick and takes in a deep breath before she blows out the final light and saunters toward the doors. She presses the candle into the last slot, watches the wax drip for a moment before her head turns over her shoulder.
The casket is still; it is only illuminated by the shadowed shine of the day’s final expanse of daylight. A hand lifts, and she wipes a few stray tears from her face before she convenes outside.
They depart along the sliver of sunlight, walking along it as the sun smiles at them from the highest point in the sky.