“Um…h-hi, everyone.”
Stop stuttering, you look like a tool. I cleared my throat and poked the crimson rose a little deeper into my black lapel. Black suit, black shoes, black socks. Everything was black.
“Well…I don’t really…know a lot of you, and you probably have no clue who I am or why I’m even here, but…” I paused, looking out at all the unfamiliar faces of the family members, of all the childhood friends. It seemed kind of horrible that I had only met them because of what had happened a few weeks before. “I, uh.” I cleared my throat again as the silence went on and the cruel November wind bit my face.

“I want you to know, she was the…the most amazing girl I ever knew.” I could feel the hot tears in my eyes, threatening to spill over. Don’t cry. You’re seventeen, for God’s sakes. I gripped the sides of the podium, looking down at the speech that I had rewritten, and rewritten, and rewritten, at least twenty times. It just hadn’t felt right, to try to honor her with words, when she had a power over words like no one I had ever met before. Her parents, who were strangers to me until that night, had insisted on me speaking because, well, I was the one who found her and the last one she spoke to. But I still felt uninvited as I looked into the eyes of everyone who had known her, cared for her, loved her since she was born.

“She could create the most, the most real stories; it, it was like you were there. That was the one way I could ever figure out what she was really thinking because, well, she wouldn’t tell me otherwise. She liked to keep things to herself. Too many things.” I paused, lifting up the carefully written speech and crumbling it in a ball, throwing it to the side. “Well, look, I’m not going to pretend that I knew her better than any of you did because most of you have always loved her. I’ve only loved her for two years. Most of the time I didn’t know it. And she didn’t either.” The air became still, and I squinted in the sun, looking out over the sea of black clothes. Her best friend’s makeup was running down her face. Her dad was holding her mom as she cried. Her brother was sitting with his face in his hands, shaking. All these things made me say something I never thought I would have said before. “I loved her. And I…I think I broke her heart a few times. And for that, I have never been more sorry. I’ve never regretted anything as much as I regret not telling her that. Sometimes I think that if I had told her, she wouldn’t have done it. But then again I don’t know. She thought that no one loved her, that no one cared. But if that were true, none of us would be here. There’d just be her,” I glanced at her casket, “her and that big, empty hole.” I gazed in the direction of the dug up Earth and her shiny, marble gravestone.

“I know I could have done so many things better. I keep replaying, in my head, all the times when I could have done something, said something to show her that she wasn’t alone. And I keep telling myself that it’s all my fault that she’s gone.” My voice cracked as I felt a few hot tears roll off my face. I took a deep breath. “But…but the truth is…we all think that. But it’s not something that we can change now. All we can do is pray that everyone touched by her remembers her, and that someday we can all become someone like her. Because we owe it to her.” I met her dad’s eyes, and an understanding passed between us. “I know I do.”