Invincible

She died in May, and her parents set up her funeral for five days after her death.

I didn’t go to say my goodbyes, even though my parents and everyone else went. Honestly, it hadn’t sunk in yet that she was gone for good, and I didn’t believe in saying goodbye if she wasn’t really gone. I stayed home, instead, and played video games to try and fix my mind and get it back together. I hadn’t cried, and I hadn’t lost my temper when I found out she died.

I just sat there and stared at Mr. and Mrs. Lowe as they told me the news.

Even after Mrs. Lowe started to sob and her husband had to hold her to make her stop crying, I sat at the table, unaffected. Even when Mr. Lowe had a tear slip from his left eye and fall down his rugged cheek, I couldn’t believe their words. My mind was not prepared to handle the death of anyone, let alone my best friend. It took days before it finally sunk in, and when it finally did, I lost it.

Hot tears of frustration streamed down my cheeks, and they were unstoppable. It was the first time that I had cried since I broke my arm when I was seven years old, and then, more than ten years later, I was crying again. It was a different kind of pain, though. A broken arm wasn’t so bad, and yeah it hurt physically, but it healed. The pain that I felt after Parker died wasn’t physical at all; my chest didn’t hurt the way people described their broken hearts to feel. The only physical pain that I felt was when I punched the wall and bruised my knuckles, and the way my stomach heaved with every single sob that racked my body and shook it.

When Parker died, it was a whole different kind of pain. It was purely emotional, and that kind of pain was worse than anything physical could ever be.

I wished that someone would have gauged my eyes out, or stab me forty-eight times rather than have her be gone. I could have handled it -- I could have taken it. But she couldn’t, and she didn’t deserve what happened. Life had just screwed her over without so much as a little curtsey to let her say goodbye. One day, she was fine and laughing and the next, she was dead from a brain tumor that had spread like a catalyst in her body.

There were little reminders of her everywhere I went.

I couldn’t sleep, because she haunted my dreams, begging me to save her and make her all better; I cried every night, because there were still some of her clothes on my floor from the last time that she’d spent the night in my room with me -- before the seizures, before the cancer, back when we were together and we would just hold each other and everything was good; I didn’t want to do anything, because I would rather spend the day laying in my bed, holding my pillow to trick myself into thinking it was her because her scent still lingered from her strawberry shampoo.

And then there was the box.

Her parents had brought it over after she died, when I didn’t show up at the funeral. Mrs. Lowe hugged me for a long moment, and she told me how sorry she was and how much she appreciated everything that I did for Parker. I wanted to push her away and ask her what I had ever done for their daughter. What had I ever done for Parker? I hadn’t done anything but let her down and make her cry; I never deserved someone as great as her to be by my side.

I never did anything for her.

“I found this in her closet,” Mrs. Lowe told me in a low, soft voice. She put the box on the table and stepped away to let me look over it for a moment, as if I knew what it was. “I think she would have wanted you to have it.”

It was an old shoe box that she had covered with blue Christmas wrapping paper. The lid had glitter all over it, and she had wrote out ‘Brian Elwin Haner Jr’ across the top in silver glitter glue. She had put small, fake gem stones all over the box and taped a piece of white paper on the side that said ‘Top Secret!’ which had been wrote in glitter glue, as well. When I picked it up, hours later, after the Lowes’ had left, it felt heavy.

I didn’t open it right away. I left it on the desk in my bedroom for weeks, wondering what was inside but too scared to open it and find out.

Days slowly turned into months and as time went by, instead of getting better, I only got worse. I felt shittier about myself than I had ever before, and all I wanted was to end everything and sleep forever. I was too big of a coward to kill myself, and I knew that I would hurt everyone if I did. But that didn’t stop it from crossing my mind every once in a while.

My biggest regret then, and in the present, was that I never told her how beautiful she was. Whether her blonde hair was greasy from sleep, piled into a bun on top of her head, or let down and styled, it didn’t matter to me; her glassy blue eyes were like the ocean and every single freckle on her face made her only more gorgeous. She never knew how beautiful that she was, and I never told her -- not even if she dressed up just for me.

But more than that, I never told her that I loved her.

She’d told me that she was sorry for not being able to make me fall in love with her. She didn’t know that she was the only girl who had been able to make me fall in love; she was the one, and she was the only girl that I would ever be able to love with my whole heart. She didn’t know any of it, because I was too big of a coward to say it. She didn’t understand how I felt toward her, or how much I cared for her, and because I was too scared to tell her, she’d died thinking she was unloved.

She died thinking that no one could ever love her.

But I loved her. My God, I loved her.