If A Double-Decker Bus Crashes Into Us

And you never knew how much I really liked you,
'Cause I never even told you – oh, and I meant to.
- The Smiths

Dear one, you were a dervish, a hurricane I can't claim to have known very well, though I knew some things about you, a distant friend. You wanted to be a lawyer, yes? You loved as though tomorrow was an illusion, and the present a dapper tune you always wanted to play, the way you plinked away at that piano in your house when we were in High School. What young things we were. I still remember those afternoons in your front yard when you helped me figure out that blasted snarl of equations – do you know I never would have passed second-year Math if it hadn't been for you? Oh, you always thought you were never enough, you looked at your sister the way I looked at mine, we always thought we were never good enough, never pretty enough, never smart enough, eternally fucking up. Have I ever told you how much I envied you for how obstinately you dismissed fear? Or how I admired you for the way you blazed past criticism, even if it was secretly wounding you? I never told you these things. It doesn't matter now, you're gone, what use is it. I'm flying home tonight, and I will see you in your casket, and of course it wouldn't be you, none of us will believe it. You were alive one minute and all your breath pressed out of you the next. I want to think that tragedy is something we should be smart enough to expect. But none of us thought you would go so soon. Oh, Ivy, you were always more than enough, did you know this?

Ivy Lalaine Omelio
02 November 1983 - 23 December 2007

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