Lately all I can see is your face; your name–I can hear your laugh, and everything I do is an echo of something we once did.

I miss you because I didn’t when you were alive, and I regret that more than anything because now I look around and there’s this feeling in my heart; a melancholy of my mind that I remember only you could understand. This pretentious, childish ennui of my soul that doesn’t belong but exists. Something that I can’t admit to anyone else because I know it’s undeserving; that we were born too lucky to be sad on our believed misfortunes.

Somehow we were both born with each other’s red string around our pinkies and it seems like life won’t allow me to forget my better half.

I remember having an urging to message you a few days before it all happened and I didn’t because I was cowardly and it seems like one of your gifts to me in all of this is the one that has taught me to never be too afraid to speak; that anger and regret and refrain is not worth the loss of time.

That all we have–the only currency, the only measure that ever mattered is just time: the time we spent being nonchalant towards each other. The time we spent never saying I love you.

I remember the way you looked in high school; how we both were too embarrassed to look at each other–too embarrassed to speak: the teenagers who were once little girls attached at the waist.I started a notebook again and I think of you when I write in it: the way your handwriting mimicked your personality, how the C’s bubbled with your laugh and the Y’s curled with your smile.

I think of you more in these past seven months that I have in these last seven years. I think of us: buying ice-cream after school in those push carts, the notes we aggressively passed. The classrooms we begged for seats next to eachother because we were sisters and how could we not.

I head home soon, and I know walking down the streets of our neighborhood will just smell of us at ten eleven and twelve; and I know I’ll cry and break and be a mess because then it’ll be in reality where you are actually gone. It’ll be in my reality, in our world, where everything of you no longer exists.

The kraft slice omelettes over rice your mother would make; our daily, late walks to school. The fanfiction, poems, Phantom of the Opera we would watch. Apple juice cartons–slices of ham and american cheese; instant noodles with vienna sausages, mustard and Tapitio: I would give up all the steakhouses, Michelin stars and thousand-dollar dinners for one more meal with you. One more chance to be near you–to talk about nothing but understand everything.

To be forgiven for all that I’ve ever done wrong; to be loved even when I’ve never done right.

Here, four thousand miles away I can pretend that you’re still breathing and smiling your dimply Sangco smile; living your life like everyone else wishes they could. Here, I can pretend that I took you away with me before our neighborhood took you alive–here, I can pretend that I took care of you like I promised your mother.

Here, you’re alive–by my side–in a castle, above the sky.