I still measure time by that day.
It was his birthday, of all days, and the world should have been soft around him. Familiar. Safe. Instead, it collapsed. Just like that. A drunk driver, careless and unreal, turned a celebration of life into an ending. The motorcycle rode up the back of his parents’ car, and in a single, impossible second, everything that made him him was gone. No dramatic scene. No warning. Just an abrupt and brutal finality. The kind that doesn’t even look real at first.
They told me there wasn’t much blood. That almost made it worse. It left room for denial, for the mind to pretend it hadn’t really happened. Like maybe he would walk it off. Like maybe someone had made a mistake.
But no one had.
I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. I didn’t get the goodbye everyone says you need. No moment to stand still or to understand. So my grief didn’t start cleanly. It scattered, confused and unfinished. A week later, I found myself standing inside his house, like nothing had changed, asking where he was. As if someone would just point and say, “He’s right there.” As if the world hadn’t already rewritten itself without him.
That’s the part that stays with me.
Not just how he died, but how the world kept moving while mine didn’t know how to.
That was the first time I learned how sudden loss can be. How trauma doesn’t always arrive in your face. Sometimes it comes, wrapped in disbelief, and then settles in your chest for years. It shows up in moments you don’t expect. In birthdays. In dreams. In the spaces where a voice used to be.
He was my best friend. My childhood had his fingerprints all over it. And when he died, something in me changed shape too, something that never quite went back.
I still carry that day. Not just the loss, but the confusion, the unfinished goodbye, the question that never really got answered.
Where did you go?
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