You’re Still in My Contacts

There are weeks, whole months, where you’d think I had moved on. But then something pulls you back into focus without warning—the particular way you laughed at things that weren’t quite funny, the way you cried at things other people walked past. I still have your name in my phone. Sometimes I almost type a message before I remember, and then the whole thing lands again, fresh and blunt as the first time.

I’m glad your old Tumblr still exists. It’s full of holes now—deleted YouTube videos, missing photos, links that go nowhere, artists who have aged out of the pictures you saved of them—but it still catches some light. I can scroll through the images you collected, the fragments of text, the music you needed people to hear. A portrait made of gaps, but yours.

What I can’t forgive in myself is that I wasn’t better when it mattered. I was cowardly and immature and overwhelmed instead of doing the one simple thing: taking your hand, looking at you, and saying out loud that I would miss you when you lost this fight. I rehearsed some long, meaningful speech in my head—something epic about life and death and where you fit into all of it—and none of it ever made it out of my mouth. Who saves me? How do I save myself? Save me. I want so badly to burn. And to fight. I think about those lines when I think about you.

So I scroll through your blog late at night instead, looking at the pictures and the plans and the small pieces of who you were, and I just want you to know—wherever you are—that I haven’t forgotten. Not the laughing version, not the crying version, not the complicated one that was all of it at once.