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If you had asked her how she thought she would die back when she had been alive, she would probably tell you she would meet her end by way of her untrustworthy vehicle hugging a highway median in a speedy and lethal embrace, or perhaps that one day she would grow weary of Murphy's Law dictating her every move in life, and would bid this unjust world farewell; 

leaving only a tipped chair and swinging heels as her last grand gesture before the final curtain fell. 

She'd no doubt punctuate the statement with a wry smile and slight laugh, and you'd be left feeling slightly unsettled and then nervous for her wellbeing, even as you chuckled along with her. 

But for all the made up scenarios she could have told you, she would've never guessed that her demise would ultimately be met by way of accident in the tiny rented bedroom of a house she hated living in.

"I feel like a ghost here. They're barely aware of my presence at all. Maybe I prick their ears with the sound of a closing door, or the muted padding of my footfalls to the bathroom or kitchen turns their heads slightly. Who knows. I think I'm forgotten as soon as that moment ends, though"

A particularly sleepless night, losing count of the sleeping pills entering her mouth as the hours dragged on. Plucking her eyebrows to the soundtrack of her favorite video game; tinny noises playing through the speakers of her laptop, passing the time. 

Two here, three there. Now two more because it's been about an hour and she works in the morning. 

And so the fateful night went.

I suppose if she surveyed the situation now, she would be sorely disappointed. 

"For all the nights- heck, all the DAYS- I spent willing my life to end in the worst possible way, wishing my body could at least spare a few tears to make me feel alive...and I die because I wanted to sleep? What a waste. Even in death, I was cheated" 

It took them 3 days to find her. 

The scene was strangely normal for all the turmoil she'd so often confided in me to be in. Turns out, she put herself through much more in life than was actually necessary to bring her to death's doorstep. 

Her phone was left unchecked on the charging port, alarm still persistently reminding her to get ready for work; countless social media notifications pockmarked the screen with bright red.

Her room was an eyesore and a mess: diet pills and piles of unopened bills collected dust together on a cluttered dresser top. Beauty products lay strewn across every surface, including the floor. Cardboard moving boxes with words like "Christmas Ornaments" scrawled on the side held dirty dishes, on the other side of the room, fruit flies congregated atop a pile of old food left abandoned on a paper plate.

Then there was her. 

Laying on her stomach in bed, a single sheet draped over the lower half of her eerily still form. Face to the side, head cradled on a mascara stained pillow with no pillowcase. She could pass for sleeping if you didn't already know.

In death, she looked neither serene nor troubled. Just lifeless. 

Near her head on the nightstand, sat the fateful empty bottle of sleeping pills and a glass of water which mere days ago, had held the liquid that would ultimately wash down her last meal.

Death by diphenhydramine. 

"Good grief, what a silly way to go. I could write a story about that, you know"

Even now, I swear I can hear her voice in my ear. Laughing at me, correcting my grammar, telling me to lighten up as I write this. 

God, I wish you could've known her. 

I would give anything just to once more see the way her cheeks flushed when you complimented her, or how her eyes could hold so much obvious pain, yet her mouth could defy its existence and you'd somehow believe her when she said she was okay.

I never had the chance to see her happy; really, truly happy, and that has plagued me with tremendous guilt since I first got the call from her distressed parents.

I don't know if she would've taken her life by choice. I don't know that. I can't know that.

I know she spoke of it with an unnerving amount of frequency, but I always believed that the fire inside her burned just enough to keep her moving forward despite the misery she showed me, yet hid from the rest of the world.

Whenever the flames dimmed and only faint, glowing embers remained, I had made sure I was always there to softly breathe life into them, and sooner or later she'd find her resolve to keep going. 

But in the end, it only took a moment of my absence on an otherwise normal night, for a strong gust of wind to extinguish her flame completely. 

To smother out the delicate existence I had all but dedicated myself to preserving. 

The only thing I know with complete and unwavering certainty, is that night, the world was robbed of someone who had greatness in them that could have led revolutions. 

Yet she had tricked herself into believing she was worthless- 

"merely a cosmic dust bunny under the bed of this vast universe",

-and I think it finally caught up with her. 

All that untapped potential now lies buried under 6 feet of dirt in a stupid wooden box. She didn't deserve a box; she deserved the world and I failed to give it to her. 

Now I mourn that a man will never know what it is to love her, and a small handful of women will never get to experience what it really meant to call her 'friend'. 

She was so fierce and passionate about the real things in life- past all the bullshit and facades- she knew what was worth her love, and would do anything for those select few she held dear, even at the expense of her own wellbeing.

I can't make any more memories with her. I only have what she left me with, and although I've tried to keep them fresh in my mind, the years pass and I start to wonder what was reality and what is now merely fabrication of my experiences with her.

A feeble attempt by my aging mind to add years onto a life that was cut so short by the most unfortunate and preventable of circumstances.

So much time has passed, but some nights she still visits me in my dreams, and we just talk. Trying desperately to make up for the lost years she should've spent by my side in one night.

When I wake from those dreams, my pillow is damp and my throat constricts painfully as I come to realize I'm still alone, and she's still gone. 

There are so many unknowns, even all this time later.

Questions that will never have answers. 

It took a lot of years for me to come to terms with knowing that and also being okay with it. 

She was always something of a mystery, and the way she left me only further served to prove that there really was no figuring her out. 

I only know I miss her every day. 

"I'm tired of people trying to somehow solve me. You know, figure me out as if I'm a Rubik's cube or a math problem. You don't ask where the wind comes from and why it does what it does. You simply let it cool your face on a hot summer day, or admire how it bends the stalks of flowers and makes the leaves of the mightiest trees tremble at its touch. 

I am the wind" 

G. Bosquez 

6/13/2015 

3:03 AM