Sunrise

• Aoife Marzol, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2019

It's almost sunrise. My first without you and I can't stop thinking about everything. You, us, life, death. It's all whirling around like a hurricane and I can't make it stop, thoughts and memories are flooding in and I fear it's already too late. I can't bear to stay awake long enough to see the end of my final sunrise, It's too heartbreaking to comprehend the fact that you are no longer here to experience it.

Death is a scavenger. A greedy pirate. Pointlessly stealing souls and leaving behind nothing but a broken shell. We too had our pirate days and like them we had a crew, but they were overboard before they knew it. Drowned in the water until it was just us. Voices in the dark, desperate and hopeless; echoing on until we found each other and climbed upon the last surviving piece of the tattered mess we had created. You gazed into the glittering abyss like it held the answers and spoke to me; your voice ringing out across the wave less ocean, One became two and we soon came to realize just how broken we really were. but we were a beautiful sort of broken, tragic and unstoppable.

Everything else holds little in comparison to those few hours with you that eventually turned into months, then years, but before we made it to forever. It all got stripped away and suddenly it was just me and the sunrise, forced to watch yesterdays lights fade from your eyes, my tears on your cheek because you were too brave to cry. You smiled through the pain because if you broke. We may have gotten too caught up with our worries to live while we could. I want you to know that I love you. We said it a million times because we never knew which one would be the last. But It should have been me. I was meant to leave you first, you were supposed to find someone else to share forever with, but now what am I supposed to do with the memory of you? It haunts me, I'm sorry. I can't live knowing that you no longer do. I loved you. And no matter how hard I try I won't ever stop loving you because you made me feel whole. You filled in the gaps of my life that no one else could and then just as quickly as you came, you slipped through my fingers like sand and all I could do was watch. I want to thank you for our version of forever, but I don't intend to plan for a future without you. It was always you. We could have made it to eternity but even then, how long did we really expect forever to last. I wanted you to be happy. I didn't expect to be the one left behind. It's not your fault, don't blame yourself. But if you held on a little longer, maybe we could have seen our last sunrise together.