Super short story because I'm bored and this is deliciously vague.

He was a tall man, wiry, who's custom was to wear a long black trenchcoat and chain smoke cigarette's at the front of the high school.

He was a loner, in the sense that he was alone in his mind, but not alone in actuality. He had long, blond hair and green eyes that were always cast upwards to the sky when he smoked. He didn't like to speak, his responses were short and curt, but he never tired of people speaking to him, and was never unkind.

He was brave and beautiful, malnourished but never downtrodden. He worked hard in school, got high marks, was well respected. He was the envy of many, though I doubt he ever paid enough attention to his surroundings to realize that.

He killed himself on a Tuesday of the last year in highschool, no one knew why. He wasn't any more unhappy than he had ever been all throughout high school.

I stood in the front row as they lowered his coffin into the ground. His mother had given me the cigarette's he had left in his coat pocket when they found him hanging on the apple tree behind their house. I had one hanging from my mouth, it was a Wednesday, a week after it happened, and the weather was aggressively sunny.

When you imagine funerals, you imagine sad, dark occasions, and there was no doubt that the assembled company was certainly sad. The weather beamed down and heated our dark suites and dresses, making them uncomfortable to stand in, though no one complained or even shifted.

I listened to his mom describe a boy I never knew. A cheery, bright boy, who fought with his mother about what kinds of flowers they would plant in their garden. She wanted roses, but he liked the look of daisies much better. She cried as she recounted this, and shared that she wished she had let him win, and that the rose bush in their backyard was never planted.

I realized when she sat down, why she said that. I had been to his house once, but I know he faced away from their house when he stepped off the branch and fell to his death. He was facing that thorny bush, full of thorny memories of a mother who did not listen to her son enough. Did not hear him out.

I was his best friend, but I barely knew him. He never spoke about himself, he always spoke about other people. He was a listener, quiet, reflective, kind. He was the best of us, and I knew that then, as they lowered his body into the ground.

I don't know if he ever knew how much people around him loved him. I don't know if he could have known how much of a profound effect he had on those around him.

When I went up to his mother, I don't know why, maybe it's because I, like him, was a social misfit, but I thought that the good and right thing to do, before I said a word, was to bow, deeply.

I heard somewhere that the deeper your bow, the more you respected the person you were bowing to, so I bowed as far down as I could, as far as I could before it began to heart.

"He just got lost." I told her, choking back tears and remembering the way he used speak, slowly and carefully. "His mind was a labryinth." I told her, and she smiled at me through the tears, understanding what it was I was trying to say.

And that was that.