To the boy that haunts me,
I apologize.
And I know if you
were here,
breathing 
and still intact,
you’d say it’s not my fault.
And I know you’re right,
that you pulled
your own trigger
and
that you chose to paint
your room alone that night
but,
maybe I could have stopped it.
And again,
I know you’d disagree,
but neither of us will ever really know. 
We could have shared 
conversation
and made purposeful smiles
to each other
instead of the ones that were 
unintentional
in the cluttered halls.
We could have simply
acknowledged
each other’s existence,
but we never got that far.
You were a blurred face
in a yearbook
much like I was to you, 
and now
I’ll never get to change it.
I could have stopped it,
as naive as that sounds.
If we had shared
words 
from the time
that we could run from our problems,
climb trees and swing
from the branches just to avoid them,
then maybe I’d know 
your story;
maybe it wouldn’t have ended.
So,
to the boy that haunts me still,
the one that 
never misses a day of stopping by
to visit me,
the one that
centers himself in my brain
to help me find a reason for staying around,
the one that 
will never stop coming by
because oblivion is real and thriving,
the one that
I could have 
known better,
I’m so sorry that you suffered,
and that you saw no lights at the end of 
whatever hell you trudged through.
I’m sorry I’ll never get to tell you
how I almost painted a mural
myself that night,
and how the world became a black hole that I 
was in the  middle of.
I’m sorry you’ll never turn eighteen,
or that you’ll never find love,
or heartbreak,
or happiness.
I’m sorry you’ll never see your kid grow up,
because you are just a kid 
yourself.
I’m sorry you left;
maybe,
if I had written this letter a little sooner
and didn’t avoid the tough questions,
you’d be here 
for me to watch thrive
quietly from the opposite end of the hall.
Sincerely,
the ghost from the yearbook