Hey buddy, I’m sorry if I misspell stuff, I’m really sick and my proteins are denaturing as I type, but here goes.

I just transferred to this school this year. I weaseled my way into the yearbook staff, dug through photos of football games, chess club, cheerleaders, and chemistry labs, interviewed the star quarterback and the award winning photography student, etc. Eventually, we worked our way into the back of the book where the school pictures and stuff go. I remember I was sitting at my desk and the computer, just scrolling through the work that had been done, and I found a girl’s name. She was 16 years old, and her name was Kaylee. She died over the summer, before I knew anyone at the school or knew anything at all about this town and the people in it.

I didn’t know her or her friends or anything. I had never heard or seen her name in my life before that moment at the computer. But naturally, I was so curious. I asked my supervisor about it, and she just kind of looked back at her computer and told me she was just a sophomore that was in a tragic accident before I was here. And I was like, “Yeah, no duh.” So I looked it up. Sure enough, right there in the newspaper there was her name and birthday and the day she died. The paragraph under her name was pretty sparse. It told about her family, and her siblings. Her friends, her boyfriend. And then it ended with the time and date of the service, and stated the obvious: that she would be missed.

It reminded me of a girl from my middle school, whose name also started with “K.” Half into our first week of high school, on September 1st, she killed herself. It was like a nuclear bomb had gone off, and we were standing in the radiation radius. We weren’t her single dad and brother, right there where the bomb struck, we were in the grasp of it’s fingers, cradled in its extremities and witnessing the decay of the way things were. I remember how things changed forever. Girls huddled in corners, crying in hallways. Boys with their heads down, eyes red-rimmed and mouths downturned, rarely seen outright crying. Teachers silent, sitting at desks and looking at pictures of their families and trying not to take it all for granted.

So.

I don’t really know what it was like before Kaylee died. I know it changed though. It was more than the obvious precursory shock, numbness, denial, and the sense that nothing is the same and everything changed when you slipped up and closed your eyes for a second. It was something you couldn’t put your finger on, something in the air, the water, the atmosphere. I try to imagine life before, walking in the hallways and thinking about who I would talk to at lunch. I try to imagine Kaylee’s technicolor summers. I try to think about the cartoons she watched on her dad’s lap when she was 4, and what her favorite color was, and what she wanted out of life. I try to imagine her with her windows rolled down in the car, singing to some song and laughing because she was young and pretty and there was nothing wrong. I try to contextualize, I try to pull myself out of my body and slip into hers. I try to walk in her skin so I can understand. I don’t what what, or why. But it feels important to know more than two lines made of numbers and letters in a small town newspaper that no one reads. She was a real person, and things changed without her.

Two months ago, I walked into the yearbook room, still bleary eyed and tired, and trying not to spill hot mint tea on my shirt before the day had begun. My friend was going through papers at a table and flicking through them with a bursting smile on her face. I saw a smudge of something that looked like purple pen ink on her arm. I walked up to her and lifted her t shirt sleeve to look, and I saw that it was a tattoo. Done in vivid purple with the silhouette of a live oak. Right under the tree read “Kaylee” in looping, black script. I apologized immediately and stepped back. She smiled and said it was okay. She said she got it done just over the weekend and that it was to commemorate a friend she lost. I don’t remember what I said after that, because it was probably something small and insignificant and nowhere near good enough. But I remember it, and it changed

It’s hard to pinpoint how things shifted most of the time. But that tattoo was the proof I needed; that even as an outsider that really didn’t know anything, someone was gone and things shifted, even for me, they shifted. And I saw it myself.

Please remember that you are someone’s Kaylee. You are someone’s “K.” You are important. Most of all, if you have to take one thing from this shittily written essay from a teenage girl, take this:

The world would be an emptier place without you.

That’s it.