Do you remember that time you bought us this gigantic Christmas present and you made me laugh at myself, and the fact that my mom was getting ill, and I was still playing the denial game?
What you don’t know is that my mom told me she hoped I never lost you as a friend (Her words: “despite everything”), because you were a brilliant person. In fact, she said “I hope there are just more and more people like him in your life, because he can make you laugh so hard”.
That was the last proper Christmas I had with my mom, and I will never forget your surprise visit and that funny, funny moment where you told me exactly what I needed to hear, even when I did not want to hear it.
When I was informed you were ill, I sat there, googling up a storm and pretending not to read the statistics. You’d finally met the person you were meant to be with, and I was determined not to accept that life could not – would not – be that cruel to a good human.
But it was, and now I’m sitting here thinking about how you used every single moment given to you. You understood that life was not some weird excuse for whining, but it was to be danced through, and laughed through, and lived, without an expectation.
When I suffered a shitty, shitty heartbreak, you took it upon yourself to continuously message me and then, to thank you, I tried to send you pizza and Mr Delivery will – now and forever – list your name as my client listing on their database. And the ridiculously stupid email exchanges where we’d forward each other chain mails and remake them for the current century. Or the time you cunningly engineered a situation so that I’d find out the truth about something I had just lived in denial about for so long…but that I’d be laughing about it within ten minutes of discovering it.
You’d always just know when I was having a bad day, and make me laugh at myself in front of that naughty little day. You had a way.
Thank you for the lessons. I will miss you, every day. X