Revelation

It's funny the way you never notice people until they're involved in some horrible tragedy. The way your life is secret and private and closed off from everyone else until one day, you realize how open you are. How much you need those other people. 1

We wear our faith like a warm, well known blanket. We bask in it's safety, and never think that as long as we clutch it about our heads, anything bad can happen to us. But when that blanket is ripped away, we're forced to see everything as it really is. Forced to give up illusions and beliefs we should have outgrown decades ago.2

And the separation is fast and painful. The wound is slow to heal, though there is no infection. 3

It's all over the news, even months later. Reports on how it's impacted the lives of us who knew best. How all the media coverage has affected the family, but mostly, what should be done to prevent things like this. My thoughts on the subject seem irrelevant, at this point. So many months later and all I want to do is to get back to my life, all I want is for the ache to fade so that I can finally forget that I ever loved, or that I was ever loved.4

Maybe I could date again.5

It's amazing, the way one person can touch the lives of millions like this. It wasn't as if they ever knew, or ever were involved. It's just that when she was gone, she was gone, and we couldn't do anything but mourn her leaving.6

What I never thought was that it would happen this way. You take out yourself, but somehow in doing so you manage to kill a whole unseen world. You kill a thousand hearts when your own stops beating. It makes me afraid to die, it makes me afraid to keep living.7

The day it happened I was out of the country, on the other side of the world, waiting for a plane to bring me back to her. It's amazing how quickly your life goes to pieces. You make the funeral arrangements because you have too, but even now, almost a year later, I can't bring myself to pack up her room.8

I mean, for who she was, everything that she was, how could I just put away what is left of her? How could I take that last step and go through her things, putting them into boxes. Getting rid of what is pointless to keep?9

The truth is, I can't. I tried, I really did for almost a month. Every night I'd go into her room and open the window the way she liked it, and sit down at her desk and start going through papers to try and get rid of them. But then I'd start reading, and then I'd start crying, and I'd have to stop.10

To think I did that for a whole month.11

The people who came to the funeral were great, they all knew her, she had helped us all in some way, but we couldn't pin point it. Her best friend gave a speech. 12

I don't talk to any of them. I tried, my boss said it might help me deal with the grief, but it didn't. I tried talking to my parents. I tried a lot of things. None of them helped.13

Now I Just go to work and hope it'll pass. I hope everyday that I won't get a call from a reporter, and that I won't have to answer any questions. Because I can't answer the ones her death raised myself.14

Looking through those papers opened my eyes. I read things that I never would have seen had she not died. Amazing things.15

I don't have the heart to dig any deeper, though. To look for the answers. I'm afraid that that is the reason she is gone, because the truth became too much. It might've been something else though. She was so far ahead of us all the time, we could only look on in awe as she passed us, and thank her heartily when she stopped to give us what we needed.16

They saying losing a twin is a hard thing, harder then just losing a sibling. But I don't know. 17

These days, I don't know a lot of things.18