April fires without you in my sight

I never thought it would be like this.

And now, I look back, and I see photos of you from when I last saw you - I was a fifteen year old girl in September of 2004. A fifteen year old girl with problems, with rebellion tucked inside her pocket and angst written across her face. I was fucked up, and you were not, but you understood me. You loved me so much, and you didn't worry as much as my mother did.

I called you one day, tears streaming down my face, my breath hard and heavy and I told you I was having an episode, and I couldn't calm down.

"Jacqui? Jacqui, what's actually wrong? Nothing is wrong. Life is beautiful."

And I couldn't give you an answer because you were right. "I'm always right," you'd say, and you meant it.

When people would ask you how you were, you'd tell them, "Better than you could possibly imagine." And you meant it. You were a light in this world, a constant, huge light. You looked down at everyone around you, and they stared up obediently! God.

You were a city skyline of a man.

I look at pictures of you now, and I feel strange. You haven't been here these last three years, you haven't seen... You missed my sweet sixteen, my high school graduation, my first National Top Ten.

But these are all such human little markers of growing up, I know. I know that you saw what you needed to see - you saw me at the worst, the very bottom of my psyche, you saw everything. You taught me and you hurt me and you loved me more than anyone ever has.

And now the everglades are on fire, the ash is thick in the air around everything, it settles on the windshield of my first car, the one you never saw. It is April, and there are fires around me, and the man who burned the brightest of all has been extinguished.

(I love you so much.)