Words can’t actually describe what it’s like to lose a friend or friends at a young age. It’s something that no one should have to experience, but when you’re young, it changes your world all too fast. When I was 16-years-old, I lost three friends within one month. Two of them I had classes with throughout middle school and high school and the other was a lifelong friend that I had known since I was literally three days old. This month changed me and the way I look at the world forever. When you’re that young, you think that nothing like that will ever happen to you. You and your friends are invincible. That’s what I thought. No matter how many times my parents told me not to take things for granted, I still felt like nothing that bad could ever happen to me. I was wrong.

One day you wake up and the entire world seems like it’s upside down and that it will never be upright again. How can you move on? A major presence in your life is gone and they’ll never be back. It seems like there’s no way. Experiencing losing a loved one makes you grow up much faster than you should have to but you don’t really have a choice. You think the wakes and funerals are the worst part, but they’re not. It’s the time after that. You remember their presence and the memories that you have with them and you know that there’s no way to go back to them or make more. A new range of emotions flow through you like never before: anger at the world for taking your loved one(s) from you, sadness because they won’t be back, and confusion because you don’t know where to go from there. But as hard as it may seem, I’ve learned that you have to keep going.

Losing them has made me realize that my parents were right, as they usually are. You should never take anyone for granted because they could be here one minute and gone the next. I hope the people I’ve lost are proud of me and the person I’ve become. A lot of the things I do, I do for them. Because they were lost so young, there’s a lot of things they will never get to experience: graduating high school, going to college, buying a house, getting married. The list goes on and on. All of the things that I have and will get to experience, I’ve realized that I need to make the most of them. I don’t take advantage of the things or people I have in my life. I always strive to make sure my family and friends know how much I love them. I never want to leave off on a bad note.

The pain doesn’t really ever go away, it just gets easier to deal with. There are times when I get really sad thinking of them, like now as I write this. But I know that wherever they are, they’re watching over all of my friends and me and that is the thing that makes me keep going.

Until we see each other again…