I will write your names on my grave as I lay down for the last time. I will shape your spirits with my tongue and hold you tight to my chest with my last breaths. You are me. I am you. Over the days and the years we have stolen pieces of each other. Irretrievable pieces that none of us will ever see again – except in the eyes of the other.

I will light candles for all of you in every church that I visit. I will throw rocks for you into the water, and wish more than anything that you were there with me to celebrate the number of skips on its reflective surface. I will look up at the sky, with the sun shining on my face. I will close my eyes and wonder where you are. I will wish you the best. I will wish that I could see you again, someday, when we both have healed. I will be thankful that we get to breathe under the same set of stars. I will feel the ache in my chest. The grief that you are not with me. The pain of what could have been. The weight of the words not said, the sights not seen, the memories not made. A life full of “could have”, “should have”, and “would have”. A life of almosts.

But I will carry your names with me always. For the rest of my life. I will protect the pieces of you that were left to my care. I will die with your names in my mind and your faces before my eyes. I will feel the phantom warmth and comfort of your touch. I will bring the shattered fragments of you with me into the after life, with the hopes that they will call you to me. That we will reunite, and I will get the chance to return to you the pieces that I stole. That I will get the chance to reclaim the pieces of me that I broke off and seared your name into.

I will see you again one day. I hope that you will see me, then, too.