before kenya fell into the crevasse
Kenya and I were friends in middle school, before I rose up and she fell into the. Sometime in the summer of eight grade, we were sitting on a white fence outside of her house that the paint was slowly chipping off of. It was next to where I used to live just next door.
“What happens when you die?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I responded, answering as honestly as I could.
My sneakers rested on the fence, her boots swung inward and outward freely. “Why are you asking?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I’m just thinking…why we do what we do. Like, religion is mostly about how to have a good life after death and lots of people live by these insane guidelines so they can go to heaven or wherever there is, and no one knows for sure whether there even is a heaven. We just…we live life for the future, I guess.”
I thought about this for a second, knowing that nothing I would say could answer these questions, but wanting to give it a try anyways. “I think people are so terrified of disappearing forever that they need to believe in something. They can’t handle the truth that one day they will be gone, and we will be gone, and no one will remember us or them or anyone, because one day everyone on Earth will be gone. And one day the sun will be gone and the Earth and every sun and every planet and I guess if all the things we consider indestructible will be gone someday, we don’t want to be, too. We all need something to give us hope. That’s what gives them hope.”
Kenya nodded. The sky was cloudless and blank, and, looking up at its empty canvas, I couldn’t help but wonder my place in the universe and Kenya’s place in the universe, and I realized that I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to be gone forever, and I didn’t want Kenya to be gone forever. That’s why people live life for the future: because we need hope that there is a future to look to.
“But I want to live life for the life, not for whatever’s after,” Kenya said, her voice loud and standing out among the silence encasing us. “I want to grab it and make the most of it before all the weight of the world brings me down,” I nodded, hoping that this wasn’t an opening speech for recruiting me into some ridiculous and dangerous stunt that would most likely result in a mild concussion. “But the problem is I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I mean, once I get out of school, what will I do? I don’t really have a purpose in life, if you know what I mean. I like doodling, but I wouldn’t want to be an artist. I sing in the shower, but I wouldn’t make it in the record industry. I’m hopeless.”
“But what about writing?” I asked. “You’ve filled up about ten thousand notebooks.”
“I haven’t filled up that many. I think I’ve filled eight of them, but I’m not sure. Anyway, that stuff is no good. It’s like…self-discovery. Through my writings I know who I am. I can be myself when I’m all alone on the paper, with no one watching and all the time I need. Do you know what I mean?”
She turned her head and looked at me, her long, dark brown hair flowing in the slight breeze. I nodded my head and she smiled. “You can be yourself around me,” I told her.
Kenya laughed. “I’m quite self-conscious. You’d be surprised.”
“Try me,” I said. “Okay, just tell me something that I don’t know about you, something that no one knows about you.”
She smiled a mysterious smile. “I can’t,” she said.
“Sometimes I really don’t understand you, Kenya.” Again, she laughed, and replied “No one understands me. It’s my life goal.”

One of the last days we were friends, Kenya and I were sitting on the same white picket fence even though I had long since moved out of the house next door. Kenya’s hair was longer and a few shades lighter, but nearly everything else resembled the day before: the sky was blue and cloudless, I wore sneakers and Kenya wore boots. I sat on the right and she sat on the left.
“I’m nervous,” Kenya told me.
“About what?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” She took another breath and the wind weaved through the grass that the tips of our shoes now reached. “Well, I guess it’s not nothing. Well, I don’t want us to grow apart. So many friends from middle school grow apart in high school. I happened with both of my sisters. I just don’t want it to happen to us.”
I sighed. “It won’t happen to us. I promise. We’ll stay friends, and we’ll prove everyone who says our friendship won’t last long. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, smiling.
We sat in silence for a while, just listening to the wind rustle the leaves in the trees towering high above our heads. The sun was slowly setting in the horizon, and Kenya yawned.
“I’ve had a long day,” she told me.
“How so?” I asked.
“My sisters are babysitting my baby cousin, and he was sleeping in the room next to mine all night and wouldn’t. stop. crying.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “If you want I’ll stand above you all night doing my best impersonation of your cousin.”
“Don’t you dare,” she said. Then there was a pause. “I don’t want things to change,” she said suddenly.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, I know nothing stands still, that things grow and develop and energy changes forms and things slowly fall apart, but I wish there was a way to freeze time and stay right here, in this moment, forever.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But the perfect moments don’t last, and in the end it never seems like it’s the perfect moments we remember but rather the terrible ones.”
Kenya nodded. “That’s true,” she said. “And all of the memories fade with us, until nothing is left.”
“But this will continue,” I said. “We will stay friends, just like right now.”
Of course, I couldn’t realize right then in that moment that later I would be struggling to talk to her, and that she would be slowly pulling away from me and falling into the darkness of the empty cracks of our high school.
I didn’t know that I would feel nostalgic when thinking of those moments in my mind when I knew Kenya and Kenya knew me, that those times were scarce and that I ought to treasure them.

before kenya and i were friends
I was in the fifth grade and she was, too. Life was a lot like it is now, with me looking at Kenya Clark for afar, but never going over to talk to her.
But one day all of that changed. It was cold outside, and there was ice covering the empty gravel lot outside of our small, one-story school. Kenya Clark was walking past, an old, most likely a hand-me-down, bag slung over her shoulder and a small paperback book in her right hand. I was standing a few feet behind her when she slipped on the ice and fell to the ground, the contents of her bag spilling out all over the lot’s slippery surface.
I ran to her and helped her pick up her books, putting them back as neatly as I could inside of her unzipped bag.
“Thanks,” she said as I helped her up. “I’m Kenya. Kenya Clark.” She brushed a few stray strands of brown hair away from her pale face.
“I know,” I said. “Any my name is Chris Ranson. Not be confused with ransom.”
“I know.” We began walked together away from the school, both of us careful of our footing this time, but still walking fast, considering the circumstances.
“It’s really icy lately,” I said, wanting to continue the conversation for as long as I could because I wasn’t sure when or if I could have another one.
“Yeah,” she said. “And my shoes have terrible grip. I fall all the time. Just watch.”
I wasn’t sure whether or not she was joking, so I just laughed. “Yeah,” I told her awkwardly, unsure of how to continue the conversation.
“It’s good to finally meet someone nice. I’ve had a pretty terrible couple of days recently.”
“How so?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just…different all of a sudden. Lonelier, I guess. But I guess life is like that: you get caught up in the moments and you try to savor them but before you know it, the moments are over and the world is dark and you’re alone all over again.”
“Yeah. I guess. But I’ve never really thought or chosen to be in those moments before. I kind of spend my life in the after-moments, I live for the future, you might say.”
She nodded. By now we were far from the school, walking towards our houses that stood directly next to each other.
“And lots of times people do live in the moments, but they imagine the future, as if they use the promise of a different life to get out of their own.” My breath was visible in the freezing air.
She sighed. “I guess so.”
We had arrived at a fork in the road. I had to go down one, and she had to go down the other. Our hands were mere inches apart and I wanted nothing more than to grab on and to never let go, to keep her beside me forever, but I knew I couldn’t do that, so I just turned around and walked away, Kenya doing the same.
At one point before her road turned into her driveway and she would be gone, I looked over my shoulder, and she looked over hers.
She waved to me, her fingers curling as the slight breeze blew her long hair over a small sliver of her face.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” she called from the other road.
“Sure!” I called back.
Kenya knew who I was, Kenya liked who I was, Kenya wanted to be around who I was.
Never before had I liked who I was so much.
So I watched Kenya disappear, knowing that I liked her, and she liked me, and in that moment everything was perfect, and I realized I was in one of the moments she was talking about. The one where I struggle to stay where it is beautiful and perfect but then, as if overnight, I find myself lost and cold and alone.
But this time the moment had to end differently. Kenya wouldn’t leave my life, she wouldn’t disappear. Everything is warm and beautiful and perfect, and I just wanted life to stay that way forever.
But I should have known that it couldn’t.

the day i told kenya i loved her
I could still smell her once she was gone. Kenya wore a very distinct perfume that smelled like some unholy mix of every fruit imaginable. It stood out in the quiet halls where I stood, staring at the corner where Kenya apologized to me for reasons currently unknown.
Noise hit me like a wall of sound as the entire junior class streamed out of the cafeteria like ice in a bottle turned upside down.
I followed the crowd and easily slipped in, so nearly no one even knew that I was even gone in the first place. I walked to English class and barely listened because I could care less what the whiteness of the whale symbolized in Moby-Dick.
All I cared about was Kenya. And sure, maybe this obsession was irrational, but I would continue chasing her until I finally got her. As the day continued on, I noticed that Kenya was absent, that she had disappeared from the school the second she had disappeared from me.
I told myself that it was nothing, but I couldn’t convince myself of it. Something was off, but I didn’t want to discover it.
I was too afraid of what I might find.

The next day, I couldn’t see Kenya Clark anywhere. The world felt colder and emptier and I realized for the first time since I first met her that I needed Kenya, and that she is more important than anything in my life.
I just had to close my eyes and willingly plunge into the crack, and to reach Kenya before she reached the bottom.
At lunch, I pulled out my phone and dialed her number from under the table, my hand brushing some of the used gum left behind by previous students. It rang five times, and then went to her voicemail.
Where are you Kenya Clark? I asked myself. Again, I came to the startling revelation that Kenya was a stranger to me; she was something I didn’t understand. People seem to like things they can understand, they take comfort in facts and figures. People don’t appreciate the beauty of the unknown. When something is covered up, it could be anything, and sometimes the unknown of it is more satisfying than the actual thing.
That was the beauty of Kenya Clark. She was a mystery, but also a person. She was not a jewel, she was not a miracle, she was not a beauty, she was simply a girl. She was a person, nothing more or less, but that didn’t mean she was one dimension. That didn’t mean that she was the simply idea of the perfect girl. She was still mysterious, but it was important to know that she was nothing more or less than a girl.
For a while I had created this idealistic version of her in my mind, some form of her that was neither real nor fake. I made her in my head until she became something more than a person, and that was who I chose to see.
But now I realize that this is not Kenya; that she is real, she is a person, and I have to learn more about her before I can decide if I ever even knew her at all.
A deep, scratchy voice came on the intercom, demanding attention from the hundreds of students occupying the classrooms.
“Please report to auditorium. Something terrible has happened.”
And then there was silence. There was an uncomfortable, incomparable, unfriendly silence across the entire school as students slowly came to life and slowly got to their feet as they slowly and mindlessly wandered to the auditorium.
Once everyone was seated, people began looking around to see if anyone was gone. I instantly saw that Kenya wasn’t present.
No, I thought. No, no! No! NO! This isn’t happening. I’m imagining…Kenya…she can’t be…
But I knew. I knew what had happened, but I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t stand thinking that Kenya…oh God…
“Is everyone here?” The Headmaster stood on the stage, looking at everyone and no one at the same time.
I took a deep breath and shuddered. No! The words screamed in my head over and over, not yet believing what it already knew. No! NONONONONONONO! Kenya is fine. She has to be. She has to.
When no one called out anyone’s name, no, not even Kenya’s, the Headmaster took a deep breath and let a few shiny tears silently stream from his eyes.
“Kenya Clark was found in her room last night.” He gulped loudly and let a soft sound escape his lips, a moan, of sorts, out of sorrow. “She had…killed herself.”
“No,” I whispered softly, not able to comprehend what was happening, because now there was no denying it. Kenya Clark was gone for good, and there was nothing I could do about. It was the most unsolvable problem. How could you help someone who had suddenly ceased to exist?
She had walked in and out of my life so many times, but now she had taken her final exit. She would never enter again. She would never talk again, or laugh again, or…live.
She was dead. She was darkness. She was getting colder every second, slowly breaking away into nothing.
Kenya Clark was dead.
Kenya Clark had left…for good.

I let the hot tears flow freely from my eyes. They blurred my vision, which I think helped me escape the present, try to remember her, to reach through time and space and go back to the moments where everything was perfect and I realized that Kenya was right.
We find ourselves in perfect moments and we struggle to hold on until we slowly, ever so slowly, begin to lose grasp of the perfection, and soon we find ourselves out of the perfect moments and we don’t even realize it until we are cold and alone and the world seems terrible and mean and dark and depressing. I felt like I did when I was telling Kenya I loved her: the words just flowed freely in my mind and I didn’t even bother to make them grammatically correct because this time, instead of telling her something I wanted to say ever so badly, I was being crushed with sorrow, and I just wished I could take everything back and start over, start on that one day that we found ourselves at the fork in the road. I wanted to hold on to her and to never let go, to never go down our separate roads both physically and mentally.
And as I was sitting there realizing over and over again that I was completely alone, I thought that if someone died, I would feel them looking down on me, but Kenya just seemed…gone. She was dead. She wasn’t coming back.
She had finally reached the bottom of the crack…she had reached the final straw; she had drowned in a sea of loneliness.
I struggled for breath, the tears rolling from my eyes to my cheeks and to the corners where my two lips met. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. I thought about it, did anything to get my mind off of Kenya. My breathing was uneven, my chest heaving and the breath heavy.
I couldn’t stay here…the halls of the school were cluttered with the memories of avoiding Kenya, of never attempting to talk to her until it was too late, until she had already made up her mind and collapsed into herself.
I stood up and ran out of the room, breathing quickly as if I was dying, and I felt like I was. Something inside of me was slowly dying, and I realized what it was: the exaggerated, idealistic version of Kenya Clark that I created in my mind.
The tears come faster now as I ran out of the school, not caring whatever punishment they chose for me. I just want to escape.
Kenya was gone. She was missing, she something I needed and that I craved, like she was water and I was stuck in a desert.
I got into my car and started the ignition. I pressed my foot on the gas and drove out of the parking lot. The roads were empty, and my hands gripped the leather steering wheel so hard that it had turned the same pale tone as her hand once was.
I pulled over at a bridge and ran out of the car. The wind blew my hair in multiple directions, covering my face like hers always did.
I could jump, I thought. I could just jump off of this bridge…and then maybe, just maybe, I can see her again.
“Was this what it was like, Kenya?” I yelled out, even though I knew know that the words would never reach her ears. “Were you just so caught up in the times after the perfect moments that you just decided to let go?” The tears returned, running down my cheeks and dropping into the black water below, which was as dark as her hair once was. “Did you push everyone away because you had already made up your mind? How long did it take, really? Did you know before I ran after you and talked to you, or was it just a quick, snap decision that you made halfway through my speech?” The tears now came in droves, falling down the moist tracks left behind by other drops. “Because if you knew all along, how could I forgive you? How could I forgive you for ignoring me when I tried to help, for pushing away everyone, even the people you loved, like your family, and possibly me?” While I was saying this, I began to get off of the edge of the bridge. I realized that if I made a snap decision and just jumped, people would suffer even more. I wiped the tears from my eyes and just sat in my car, looking out at everything around me, wondering why it still had the privilege to live and Kenya didn’t.
The fact that everything seemed so big helped me realize that the world is larger than Kenya, and it’s larger than me and it’s larger than anyone.
I had let Kenya go. I was just as guilty as anyone else. I let her go slowly, I watched her as she descended so far into the crack that she would reach the bottom, where there was no light at all, where everything was freezing and where darkness slowly consumed her.
I had let her go so many times, but now I was having trouble letting her go because I knew that she wasn’t coming back.

Kenya sat before me, yet she was so far away. I tried to reach out to touch her, but I couldn’t. I saw her open her mouth, I knew her words, but I couldn’t hear her voice. And then she was gone, and I was falling, I could feel my body soar through the air until…
I hit the ground and woke up instantly. My arms were wrapped around myself, and I was shivering on the ground, as once again the crushing feeling of loneliness and emptiness hit me once more.

Once I had gotten dressed and was inside of school, I looked around at everyone. They all seemed quieter, a little bit morose, but all together, everything was the same. They had already let Kenya go. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t just forget about her and watch her fade into the darkness, become a shade of who she once was. And once that happened, it would become even easier to forget her entirely.
Everywhere I turned, memories of Kenya struck, The place where, somehow, we ceased being friends, and finally, the place where I last saw her, the place where I let her go and watched her walk away…for good.
Was I the last one to see her? The last to talk to her? Why did she kill herself after I made a point to come out to her?
Then I realized why.
Her mind was made up, she had already given up and now she just waited for a good chance to self-destruct and collapse. And that had been the perfect ending, a close of a relationship, everything had been resolved and now she could leave knowing that she wouldn’t leave me unsatisfied.
She had known all the time. Of course she had, that was the type of thing Kenya would do, wait for you to tell her what she already knew so she could leave fully, knowing that I would know that she knew, and everything would seem…fuller, purer.
“What’s going on with you?”
I was pulled out of my comatose state of remembrance and back into reality. But what if I didn’t want to be in reality, because in my fantasies Kenya was still alive, and we were still together?
“Nothing. Just…thinking about…Kenya…I guess.” I looked around the table, looking for any human emotions, anything from sorrow to denial, but nothing showed.
“She was just looking to kill herself. If she needed someone to talk to, she just could have. She just chose to die, she wanted it,” said a boy named Kyle Nelson said from across the table.
At that moment I wanted to yell, to tell him that they were the cause of her death, that they were the ones who made her…kill herself. But I didn’t. I just looked down.
And that was when I realized it, as a sudden truth hit me like a train barreling straight at me on its track: Kenya Clark wasn’t the one in the cracks. I was. I was the one who spent life looking at things from the outside, wondering what it would be like in any other place but the one I was in. I was the one who spent my life silent because I was too afraid to talk and too disgusted to make a noise. I was the one who was pushed to be a certain something, the one who was being idealized. It was never Kenya. She was the one trying to help me until she realized it was impossible. Perhaps that life was impossible. And maybe it was when I let the rest of my so-called friends hurt her that she realized she needed to escape herself; that she needed everything to end. But first she had to do her best pull me out of the crack. She had to save me before she folded into herself and just collapsed into nothingness. Perhaps if I had come out of the crack sooner, she would still be alive.

The dim light of the moon shone through my window, creating a small ray of light that was just enough to see by. I sat in my bed, unable to fall asleep. I couldn’t possibly let myself sleep knowing that she was gone, forever. And even when I dreamed about her, we were separated by something, whatever separates the world of the live and the world of the dead.
A cloud moved out from under the moon, brightening its light shining on my desk directly across from where I lay in my bed. I looked at it, studied it from top to bottom so I could avoid any thoughts of her, of her being dead, of the absence of her presence in the world.
There was a patch of darkness in the crack between the floor and the desk. It took me a few seconds to realize that it wasn’t a spot of darkness at all. It was a spine, a jet black spine. And I recognized it immediately: it was a spine to one of Kenya’s composition notebooks.

I instantly got up from my bed, pushing the covers off of myself and quickly striding across the room, my bare feet slapping the old, worn-down wood. I lay down on the cold wood and reached my arm into the desk. I felt the cool spine of the notebook and pulled it out.
I opened it to the first and closed my eyes, listening to the crinkling of the wrinkled paper as I flipped it from the right side of the notebook to the left. My fingers felt the page, and I could feel where her pen touched the page. If I smelled intensely, I could almost make out her smell, like I did in the hallway the last day she spent as a person…
I opened my eyes and took a shaky breath as I looked at the words on the page in her perfect, straight handwriting that I had memorized years earlier when I sat behind her in class. The teacher had thought that I was cheating, but really I just wanted to look at her write, look at the way she looped the bottoms of her y’s and dotted her j’s so thoroughly that the ink occasionally went into the next paper, or her desk…
Tears came out of my eyes again, but I stopped them quickly because I didn’t want to smudge the words covering every spare space on the pages of the notebook.


Chris,
By now I am already gone, and I know you probably hate me for it, but I simply couldn’t stay any longer. I just needed to escape from everything surrounding me, like a wall blocking me from some unforeseeable fate. It seemed so obvious and right and pure, and I’m sorry if I hurt you because of it.
Inside of this notebook I have expressed my life, and I hope you can begin to understand how and why I left, even when I knew I would leave you behind.
I know we were only friends for a few years before we were separated, but I waited for you to come to me and tell me you loved me because I knew you did and I knew you would.
And the truth, Chris? The honest truth is that I loved you, too. And writing this notebook to you kills me inside so much that I wouldn’t be surprised if this was how I killed myself after all.
So, just before you read on, I just want to say sorry for putting you through this, because I imagine it kills you just as much as it does me, though I sincerely hope it doesn’t.
If you don’t want to read on, I would understand. I know that it could hurt you; I understand you won’t want to relive everything, and I understand that you might not even find this notebook. But please, for me, I urge you to continue, to keep on reading so you can know truly why I left.


I looked at the page for a while even after I had read it. She had left this for me. She had left me something specifically for me, to talk to me, perhaps to make up for all the time that we had lost.
And for some reason I was happy. Not because she was dead, but rather because she was alive. For the time that I was reading this, she lived again. Not the exaggerated, idealistic version of her that I created or the shade of her that was a memory that everyone else was remembering, but her! It was her, the real her, and somehow it was so much amazing than the perfect version I created because she was herself, she was an actual person.
But what if reading this made me miss her even more once it was over? What if reading it made me feel like she was even more gone than before, and also by willingly finishing this, I would be willingly letting her go, probably for the last time now. Yet still I thought it would be an insult to her memory not to go on. So I took a deep breath, sighed…and slowly turned the page.


It started when I met you, I guess. You were so nice, and we were perfect for each other. And I don’t know if you guessed this, but I wanted to talk to you for so long. In fact, I slipped on that ice on purpose because I knew you would help. And I knew that slipping on the ice would be a good ice-breaker (I’ve always loved puns), so… I just went for it. And sure enough, you helped me up, and we talked all the way home, and it was almost like a dream.
But as I told you, once the dreams are over, reality is even worse.
And in a way, high school was our reality.


“No,” I whispered, and for a single silver of a second I forgot that she was gone, forgot that there was no way she could ever hear my words to her. “No. Our reality was our friendship. That was real, Kenya. And it could have gone on if…if it wasn’t for me.”


And just as quickly as we had come together, we were torn apart. And just like I was watching you, you were watching me. And I waited for you to come to me, to finally confess your love after all those years of silence…but you didn’t. And in a way, it broke me inside. Each day a tiny piece of me was torn off. A fragment, you might say. And that’s why I left this notebook, so you could pick up the fragments that I left behind, in a way.
And perhaps you can assemble those fragments into something that resembles a person.
So my introduction is over. All I can do now is to show you my life, to put you back into that school, but this time behind my eyes.
And maybe then you’ll know why I left you. Maybe then you’ll understand why I had to leave, why I couldn’t spend another day in that school.
But more importantly, I hope you can learn why I pushed you away, the one person who might actually be able to help me.


I looked at the page, looked at the place where her hand touched the paper. And though I was fighting them back, tears came out of my eyes, and despite my best efforts, there was no stopping them.
“Where are you, Kenya?” I asked. “You just feel gone to me, neither here nor there. I thought I would feel you when you were dead, at least think you were somewhere, but I don’t and I can’t because I truly don’t believe that you are still alive in some way.”
The sun was slowly rising in my room, and I jumped when I heard the ring of my alarm clock. I pulled on a shirt and pants and picked up the notebook, picked up the one thing that linked me directly to Kenya Clark, the girl who once was.