If love could have kept him here, he never would have left. He would still be filling doorways with that familiar presence, still weaving himself into the everyday moments that felt softer because he was in them. He was so many peoples’ person, the warm laugh in a cold room, the steady shoulder when the world tilted, the heartbeat that made others feel less alone. A constellation stitched across so many lives.
And now those lives walk around with pieces missing. Friends who lost their compass. People who lost their favorite hello. He was a lantern in so many hands, and the night feels darker without him.
What haunts me, what makes my chest burn, is knowing that all of this hurt, all of these trembling hearts, exist because in one flicker of time, the lie in his mind roared louder than the truth we would have drowned him in. Louder than the love that would have wrapped around him like armor, if only it had reached him in that moment.
It is not fair.
It is not right.
It feels like the sky cracked open and swallowed something precious, leaving the rest of us standing in the wreckage, palms outstretched toward a light that should never have gone out.
