I can't bear to visit your grave. The thought of you lying in the cold, dark earth, such a stark contradiction of you in life. You were the summer sun, golden and warm, bright and lingering. Your death is the winter solstice cold and gloomy, a darkness upon the hollow beating of my heart.

Echoes of our last ill fated conversation pound through my head.

"I want to end it all," you'd said.

I sat in my car, the humid night air slipping through the cracked window. The harsh glow of convenience store fluorescents casting a ghostly pallor as silver tears slide down my face, words collecting in my throat like cars on a highway at quitting time.

You sighed into my ear, anguished cries traveling hundreds of miles across states and airwaves, me frozen with inability to help

A broken utterance breaks free from parted lips "please don't" but it sounds like the scratch of a record...garbled and incomprehensible

A sad laugh bubbles from your mouth, a not so convincing reassurance that I foolishly snatch up and cling to, cradling it against my chest, a hopeful Phoenix rising from the ashes of your pained and broken soul.

You hang up with the promise of a call in a few days…a call which never comes. Flashing words on a computer screen greet me days later.

Hey girl

My heart stops. Eyes unseeing what hearts already know.

Sit down before you read this and I am serious

Tears are flowing

My heart is disintegrating

I don't know if A told you but R passed away last night.

Passed away last night – thump thump – passed away last night – bang bang

Like a puff of cigarette smoke on the afternoon breeze, you are gone. Life snubbed out like a burning cherry under the toe of a worn out flip flop.

My life changed in the blink of an eye, the click of a mouse, the loading of a page. All that was left was that one solitary second of silence as the heart stops beating before the chaos and noise of tormenting anguish takes over.

Seconds to minutes, and minutes to days, hours to months and before you know it, the season has changed four times and it's now been a year.

I scream at an unhearing God, I shake fists at the heavens then pound the ground. How could you do this, how could He let you?

I want to suck it all in, rewind time. Drove all night, convinced you to take it back. Begged with bleeding knees to hand the pain over, give it all to me. I want to save a soul, carry the burden of your pain that was too much for you to bear.

I can't look at your pictures, can't see you alive yet frozen. Smiling lips and pained eyes, the stitches on my heart are ripped apart, peeled back and pinned down.

Exhibit B – adult female, broken heart circa 2008.

My grief fluttering out like a fleeing kaleidoscope – all fluttering wings and flitting colors.

My sorrow lay bare, slipping and spilling, stealing the color from my world, once vibrant now a gray edged vignette. Ash colored smoke hovering along the edges of my vision a dark winged demon waiting in the wings.

I know the pain was not your own. The struggle to breathe, to exhale, to blink and sigh – a design, a silent cry for help but most likely a painful acceptance. A slow acknowledgment of the end hurtling toward you – a passenger on the rollercoaster of life gone off the rails.