It’s hard to believe you’re gone for good.
Not just hard to believe. I actually cannot fathom a world where 
you’re not there by my side, 
every step of the way.
Like, I can’t process your absence in my life. 
I wake up everyday, expecting you to be dosing in your favorite armchair,
soaking up the morning sun, your reddish brown hair a fiery gold in the daylight.
The absence of your faint snoring lulling me to sleep every night is deafening. 
You can’t be gone. Not for good. You just can’t. 
 
It isn’t fair. 
You left too soon, and it is not fair. 
You weren’t even seven. It isn’t fair that the cancerous masses in your liver, 
in the lining of your abdomen 
caught up to you before we could even formulate 
a plan to get you through that hellish torture. 
A way out. There’s always supposed to be a way out, isn’t there? 
Be calm, think rationally, and you will find a solution. 
Who decided that you would be the one case where there wasn’t? 
Who decided that it was fair for you to leave when thousands others stayed?
 
What I would give to have just five more minutes in your presence.
I don’t even need to talk to you. 
I just want to hold you, one last time. 
Not like the last time I actually held you, 
your limbs stiff,
cold in my sticky, tear-soaked hold. 
Unmoving. 
I don’t want that. I want a better last memory. 
Just one more with you, and I promise I’ll let you go 
for good.
Except, I could never make that promise. 
If I had even one more minute with you, 
I would never let go.
 
When I lost you, I lost me,
because so much of me was you, and so much of you was me, 
and the day we were no longer a we 
broke me in a way I didn’t know was possible.
I don’t think any amount of grieving and talking and growing 
and changing and whatever else they tell you to do when 
you lose the one thing keeping you going 
will bring that part of me back.
Nothing’s been the same since you left. 
Since you were taken.
 
Acceptance is supposed to be the last step isn’t it?
The Five Godforsaken Stages of Grief.
You get through your depression and 
boom, suddenly you’re a new person.
Capable of living in society again.
Maybe I’m just skeptical. 
Maybe that isn’t what acceptance is. Maybe it’s learning to live with your pain.
But I don’t want to live with my pain. 
I don’t want to live in a world where you don’t get to.
I don’t think I’ll ever be in a place where 
I’m ready to accept the fact that I will never see your face, 
your deep brown eyes, your lopsided smile ever again.
Because it hurts. So much.