Loss.

A Poem by CallieTaylor

It doesn't rhyme. It's just a short piece of something relating to missing someone I loved deeply as a friend.

I know how it feels. It feels like you've been shot. Like a hot cold searing pain straight through your heart into the very soul of you. It feels like every breath you take shouldn't be yours. It’s that feeling when you’re curled up in the fetal position and you’re checking their facebook feed on the floor because it can’t be true, it can’t be, because you were just talking less than twenty-four hours ago. How can someone be gone when you were JUST speaking to them? How can the world lose someone SO good and pure and light? It feels like every description of pain has fallen short because there’s not a word that has been invented in this world or the next that can accurately describe this feeling that’s roiling up inside you. It feels like your heart has been torn from your chest. It feels like gasping and shaking and nightmares and screaming and crying and more shaking. It feels like blacking out and dying and living all at the same time. It’s that feeling that you are totally numb, but you are amazed at how much you can actually feel. You can feel every breath, the way the air feels on your skin, the slightest thing registers as both feeling and nothingness. It feels invasive and wrong and you want to twist and turn and fight it like some kind of wild, wounded animal.

It feels like nothing in the world could ever be right when something THIS wrong has happened and how could it happen to someone like that? Your eyes hurt and are puffy and you ache and you aren't sure of anything except the blinding existence of pain where there was once peace. It feels like dying without the reprieve of death. It’s a shuddering gasp as your body releases the food you’ve eaten, and you clench your stomach. It feels like you’ll never wake up from the nightmare that is now life. It feels like the world should stop. Everything should be stopped right now so why are people still out there acting like things are fine. It’s missing classes and suffering at your job and falling down and shutting down. It’s coming home and knowing that you just said goodbye. It’s seeing him there, and not being able to take the pain. It’s that moment of final goodbye that you just can’t face or screaming out of your balcony at two in the morning when you can’t sleep because you just miss him and need him and now he’s gone and there’s a void in your heart where he was and now it just feels like you keep getting shot straight through the heart. Every time something seems okay the pain is back and you just can’t breathe.

It feels like I still miss you this much every day. You were more than my friend, you were like my brother. I love you Harlan.