To Major, my best friend

by Gerard
(London)

These are just words, but it has taken ten years for me to come to terms with how much you meant to me, Major, and to put it into words.

I look back now and think of when you passed away... I felt like I would crumble to dust, like the life-force had been sucked out of me.

Forgive me, Major, I had no money to bury you properly. If I could have afforded it, a Pet Cemetery would have been appropriate, a headstone to visit, tend, and grieve over.

A headstone wouldn't even do it. If I could have afforded it, a huge monument would have towered over anyone passing through. I would have built it myself with my bare hands, if I were allowed a place to put it.

I wonder often whether the inscription should have been high up, so that passers-by would have to crink their neck to read it, looked up to in death as opposed to always looked down upon in life, or for the inscription to be very low to the ground, so that those who pass should have to bow down to read it, lower than the height you walked yourself.
That's where any mere human deserves to be... on his knees before you.

I still have photos of you and me when I was a kid, and I never smiled so widely as when we played together. I don't think I ever have since.

I only come close when I look at your photos. Mmy heart feels strong again like it once was.

I would give anything and everything, all my money earned, all my friends and partners over the years, all my memories, to step into that photo and have you next to me again. If it meant being an awkward teenager again forever, then so be it.

You took a piece of me with you when you passed. I'm not religious, but I tell you this--if there is an afterlife, they have no place calling it heaven if you are not there waiting for me.