15 f i f t e e n

The entire room filled with roughly thirty people is silent apart from the sobs of Tobi's parents and two other boys. Ashton stares at the back of one of them, his blonde hair curling away from his face and his brown eyes hidden behind his hands folded in front of him. A woman sits there rubbing his back sympathetically, her face concerned as she stares at him. He can see the tears in her eyes too, but he wonders if they're for his dead lover or for the man next to her.

The other boy crying stares at the casket, his mouth covered with his hand. Tears flow over his fingers and drip onto the carpet so harshly that Ashton can hear them hit in the silence. Ashton's face is blank as he turns to stare at the casket, boards filled with pictures of Tobi bordering it on either side. His lips stay slightly parted and the image of her dead body sits fresh in his mind, never leaving. The blood coating the kitchen stays in his mind, eyes open or closed. It feels as if it's still soaking into his skin, dripping off of him.

Ashton leans forward on his knees and covers his face with both of his hands, scrubbing it. Why do I lose everything closest to me? He asks himself as he parts his fingers to stare at the bland carpet under his feet. His mind wanders to the envelopes tucked into his jacket, all of them labeled with the title of someone important to her. He still hadn't read his. Couldn't. It was too fresh in his mind. Hadn't fully set in yet.

A hum settled in the back of his mind as he thought of every expression of her's. Now she wouldn't make all those faces for him. She couldn't. Now every expression was locked safely within his mind, separated from the plastic looking version of her that sits in the casket in front of this crowd. Lifeless.

Finally, the tears begin pouring from his eyes and he has to bite back a sob as his shoulders tremble. Everything he'd ever seen and talked about and listened to and everything in between with her flashes in front of him as he weeps, his face scrunched in mourning. He wondered if he could've done something if he had stayed with her instead of going to try and catch a flight that he ended up missing anyway. He wondered if they would've still been together if he'd convinced her early on to get it removed surgically. Had he done that, would they still have been together?

He didn't know, but if he'd convinced her then... maybe she would be alive. Maybe they still would've ended up together, in love. Maybe he wouldn't have had to attend the funeral of the best person he'd ever met in his eighteen years of living. But maybes don't do any good. Maybes only drive people further into grief.

✿✿✿

"Excuse me," Ashton mumbles to the woman sobbing on the stairs at the front of the building.

When she looks up, he takes in a sharp breath. She and Tobi look almost exactly the same apart from their eyes. "Yes?" Tobi's mother whispers, her voice breaking.

Ashton sits a short distance from her and stares ahead of him. "I'm sorry for your loss. Tobi was an amazing woman." She doesn't respond, just hides her quivering lip behind her hand. For a long moment, they're both silent before Ashton lets out a sigh, his hands fidgeting with the letter inside his jacket. Holding the edge between his forefingers, he says quietly, "My name is Ashton. I was..." He trails off. Was. "I was a friend of your daughters."

Her voice breaks as she asks, "You're that young man that found our daughter, aren't you? The one who called all of us?"

Her words make the image all the clearer in his mind, and he has to focus intensely on his shoes to keep himself from breaking down. "Yes, I am." He remembers dialing all of the numbers on the paper, his throat dry as he told all of them what he'd found, the disbelieving silence following. The sobbing just after the silence. He thinks about the box he'd pulled from under the bed, his fingers numb. Shaking his head, he continues quietly, "I have to give something to you. It's... from her."

The eyes of the woman become glossy with tears as Ashton pulls the envelope addressed to her from his jacket. For a long moment, she only stares at the envelope between his fingers. Finally, she mumbles, "Please, I don't want to read this right now."

His grip tightens on the letter and he says quietly, "You don't have to read it now. But, please, take this. This one isn't for me, it's yours." Without waiting for a response from her, he slides it across the stair towards her and stands to leave.

As he nears the door, he hears her mutter a quiet, "Thank you." He doesn't respond, instead just takes his leave. The quiet murmur of voices from around the hall buzzes in his ears as he thinks about the woman. She's just lost her world, her only daughter. He can't imagine feeling worse than he does now, but he knows that what she's feeling must be his pain multiplied tenfold.

✿✿✿

Fiddling with the letters in his jacket pocket, Ashton walks to the three men sitting in the empty room across from the main hall. They look up, all their eyes somber. "Hi," Ashton says as he takes a seat in their small circle. "I believe all of you must be people that were close to Tobi? Her father, brother and..." He focuses on the other guy in the small circle. "Dennis, I presume."

"Hey, you..." Tobi's brother speaks up, his voice breaking slightly. After clearing his throat, he says quietly, "You sound kind of familiar. Do we know you somehow?"

All of them focus intently on Ashton and his gaze finds his shoes. "Yes, I'm..." He trails off, his mind wandering to finding her again. "I'm a friend of Tobi's. I'm the one that... that called all of you." All of their faces scrunch into a similar expression of grief as they remember the phone calls.

The oldest of the group, Tobi's father, squeezes Ashton's shoulder slightly. In a low, somber voice, he says to him, "Thank you for calling us."

Ashton nods and returns himself to the main reason he approached them. "Yes, well, Tobi left all of us letters and... I came over here to give them to you. You can read them when you want, but, please, take them now. I can't hold onto these letters for any of you. They aren't mine to keep." Wearing a similar expression, they all accept the envelopes extended to them. For a moment, Ashton is silent before standing and mumbling, "I think I should get going."

✿✿✿

Three years later

×××

Placing his bouquet of flowers on the grave, Ashton stares at the headstone blankly. "I still miss you, y'know." Is all he says. The crisp leaves of autumn shuffle around him as a gust of wind blows through the cemetery and he shoves his hands in his pockets.

The sound of the rustling leaves drowns out the crunching of gravel as someone nears him. "Hi," A woman says, startling him. He jumps at the sound of her voice, whipping his head around to stare at her. With a laugh, she asks, "Who are you visiting?"

It seemed bizarre to talk to someone so casually in a cemetery, somewhere where people come to mourn for the loss of their loved ones. Turning to face the headstone again, he tells her with a shrug, "My girlfriend."

The woman comes to stand by him, staring at the headstone. "Tobi? So it is a girl, huh."

"You can tell?" Ashton asks as he takes a hand out of his pocket to scratch at his stubble.

"Well, yeah." She says with a shrug. "It's all in the spelling, right?"

Sighing, he responds, "Yeah, that's what she told me." It's quiet between them for a moment before he repeats her question, "So who are you here to visit?"

She digs her toe into the dirt and replies, "My grandma. She passed away when I was four, so I don't remember a lot about her, but..." As she pushes some of her chestnut-colored hair behind her ear, she finishes, "I still really miss her. My grandparents were really nice and I spent a lot of my time with them because my mom used to go back and forth through rehab." He goes to open his mouth to say something, but she waves it off as if she'd already predicted he would. "It's okay, I don't have a problem talking about it."

While she fiddles with the strings of her hoodie, she says, "You know, you don't ever really stop mourning someone. It's okay, it just kinda sucks sometimes. Like, every once in a while you'll get hit by a wall of sadness and it's just... not fun." With a laugh, she shrugs and says, "No other way to put it. Love is the same way; you never stop being in love with someone, no matter how long you're apart, if they're dead, or anything like that." She turns her head to look at him, slightly tilted, and they lock eyes. "Y'know?"

When she says this, it all just seems to click into place for him. She never fully stopped loving Dennis, the one he later learned she loved after Dennis and he had met a few months after her funeral. It was my fault. He remembers Dennis telling him. But it wasn't. A small smile fills Ashton's lips and he tells the woman next to him, "My name's Ashton, by the way."

"Daliah." She responds with a smile. Rocking back and forth on her feet, she asks, "Mind if I call you Ash, instead?"

He thinks back to that first real conversation with Tobi and smiles. "No, that's fine. Hey, Daliah?"

"Yes?" She says, drawing out the word.

"Wanna get some coffee sometime?"

Her smile widens considerably and her face goes pink. "Yeah, I'd love to!"

Ashton smiles softly at the beaming smile she wears. Now he wants to fill his memories with the expressions of someone new, someone who can be just as important to him as she was. He'll keep all those memories close, old and new, and never let them go.