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Music was everything to me and when I had nothing but you, the music took me back to times when I had everything with you. The sharp and soft chords define who we are and who we were. The tangy smell of blood spilling from my fingertips as they are rubbed raw from how I shred these chords for you are the only things that keep me with you. I hear you in every note and strum, feel you in the way my heart beats when I catch the rhythm, and I taste your mouth on mine with every passing drift of lilting music.
This music that springs within me keeps me next to you, within you. It makes me feel the warmness of our past as if it were just yesterday when we first kissed. The first song tastes like our first time and everything that came in between, before, and after. It sounds like the encounter, the love, and the loss of a heartbreak I was too young to handle. It is us and everything we once were and it is everything we had the potential to become.
Of course, though, we didn’t. We never became anything and so I share these lost prayers with the world in hopes that at least one of them will listen to the sad, sad sonnet of our story. That one whispered song can become an echoing ballad of what we were. So, dearest winds, sweep up this tale and let it take you, all of you, towards an ending that will only ever feel bittersweet. Farewell my love, and my lost one, and the sweetest thing to ever happen to me.
Let us begin in the well-remembered past of your Junior year of high school. The beginning of you and of us and everything in between…
You were warm like the sun, radiating a glow despite how hard you tried to hide it behind your long hair and big clothes. All of the layers could never block out your shine, the shine of your eyes and the way they darted across the halls, searching for that something. The moon to your ever-shine.
You smiled, kind and polite in my direction and I felt that warm radiance first hand. It staggered me and all I could do was watch as you ducked into the same room I was headed for. The fated room that would spell out our fatal bond. The encounter that would leave the both of us helplessly in love. I stepped in after you, hastily taking my seat so I could enjoy your shine for just a moment more.
When you got your syllabus, you actually smiled despite the other groans echoing through the large space of the music room. Who knew everyone would be that upset over all of the work in store for them. You weren’t upset, though, you were glad to see the thick packet of assignments in front of you. You even smiled. God, how your smile lights up the room. I could think about it for hours on end and still never get tired of the way your grin was like my kryptonite. You even had me smiling for the rest of the day.
Those first weeks were bliss. We never spoke much in the first month but I was happy just to watch you trill away at the grand piano that sat in the center of the music room. You were so graceful with how you hit the keys. Each note sent thrills through my body, ones that only a true pianist knew how to make. You were incredible.
In the second month, we finally spoke one on one. You asked me for a pencil and I told you a joke about pencils. A silly and dumb one that I had heard a million times from my 9th grade English teacher. You laughed and I felt like I was floating on the softest cloud for a moment, but then you stopped and I sank and fell through the cloud and back to the ground. Back to the reality where we weren’t as close as we would become. You left with that pencil and I felt the crawling emptiness resurface and bring all the cold truth it came with.
We got to know each other in the third month. The month when we both finally saw a bit of each other that no one has seen. You stayed after class with me one day while I was cleaning my guitar and you were wiping away the dust on top of the piano. You asked me if we had any work due for after the weekend and I groaned and told you all about my dreaded weekend that I would spend with my grandparents. You had complained about your own family and suddenly we weren’t strangers, but friends who had known each other for quite a while. You smiled again and I flew once more. You left again and I sank once more. Deep, deep down into that loneliness again.
Winter break approached and this leads us into the next melody, the love. It was a December full of hidden glances and flirtatious dances. We even talked in front of other peers as if we had been together forever. That was when I knew I was in love, when you pulled me away after class and joked with me until the next bell rang. We were happy for a while. Things kept slowing and speeding up and before long it was February and there was oh so much between us.
That February is when the heartbreak took place. The month of love had turned into tragedy when you caught me watching you when I should have been far far away. I had grown used to watching and never doing, but now was the time for action. You protested and screamed beautiful notes when I took you for the first and last time. You loved me to death, one might say, and so I did the same.
They never found your body, even after I took so much care to bury you in that bed of flowers you so loved to take roses from. What we had was beautiful and melodic and now it’s gone. We could have been so much more. Thank you for the beginning, the middle, and the end of our love.