After You Were Gone

What do you remember about 2012?
I was sixteen, and there was much talk of the end of the Mayan calendar. Apparently it foretold the end of the world, or something of that sort. But, of course, doomsday never arrived.

Then again, if I were more superstitious, I might have said there was something to it. 2012 did bring a kind of apocalypse to my community. Two of the students at my school killed themselves, just weeks apart. And there were at least thirty other youth suicides in the area— so many that Northland was assigned an offical “suicide prevention officer”.

Today is the anniversary of one of those deaths… of Mia’s death. By way of memoriam, I thought I’d share a poem I wrote about her, way back in 2012. As with the last piece I shared, I wouldn’t call it great literature. But for all its clumsiness I think it captures something of the experience: of the painful irony in someone being better known in death than they were in life:

After You Were Gone

We’d never noticed you were there
But we all knew when you weren’t here
And we all wondered why you went
And why it wasn’t us instead

And we all wrote your epitaph
On bathroom walls and dust on cars.
And weary weathered caretakers
Ran battered hands across the letters
And put their paint and bleach away
And left graffiti there to stay.

And we all got our yearbooks out
To see how the girl in the picture felt
And stared into your printed eyes
Two by three in black and white
Of all the faces on the page
Only yours would never age.

You were the girl we never met
The face we never could forget
And we all knew your name
And we all felt your pain
Your voice had never been so strong
As after you were gone.

For Colin, Mia, and all the others who died that year. May their memories be a blessing to us all.