Sitting here and not even knowing what to write. I should let go, allow the sadness, let go of my guilt. But how do you let go of the guilt when the person is no longer there? You're no longer there, gone too soon and the guilt is eating me up. If I hadn't been able to see it much earlier, I wouldn't have been able to see the signs.

Signs that were so clear in retrospect. Your soul was broken, your eyes were empty and yet all I saw was that smile, I heard your laugh and believed everything was fine. You weren't allowed to stay here, your father wanted you to live with him, away from all the bad influences. But you were even lonelier there, he was hardly there, always on business trips. I can understand the path you took then, in a certain sense, but I will never understand it. You called me 2 days before, you were planning your 18th birthday and asked if I would come anyway. I said no, you were stoned again and I didn't want to put myself through that. I didn't want to hear about your plans either. You said it would be the best party of your life...

It was your last. I wrote you another message and congratulated you, but there was no reply. I didn't think anything of it, after all, you were out partying and you were angry because I had rejected you again. Even when the fatal accident was reported on the news the next day, I thought nothing of it. It wasn't until your mother called a day later and accused me of being to blame that I had certainty.

You invested everything from your father's house that could somehow be turned into money into drugs and alcohol and threw one last big party. Then, drunk as you were, you got into your car and crashed it into a tree at 180 speeds. Your best friend, who was sitting next to you in the front, died at the scene of the accident, his brother barely survived.

Now, after all this time, I still sit here and ask myself, “How could you do that?”

To this day I haven't found an answer to it and I probably never will.

RIP