In the past two years, I have seen three of you succumb to the pressures of life. I didn’t really know any of you but I knew your smiles. I knew your laughs and radiating happiness. I knew your contagious energy and the way you lightened up a room. What I thought I knew, however, was that you were the happiest people in school. The energy you gave off and life you spread with others made it easy to believe you were content and well off but none of you were. You all had your demons and every day battles that some of us did not even know existed. Naturally, we all wished we had known. We all wished we had known you and thought that, if we had, we somehow could have saved you. The unfortunate reality of it is that, no matter how hard we may wish, we cannot change what happened… but that is okay. Watching the pain those who surround me feel because you are gone has led me to write this to you. On behalf of them, there are a few things I want you to know:

First off, no one is mad at you. What happened to you sticks with us every day but there is no anger towards you. None of us can really feel how you felt; none of us can truly understand what was going on in your head. The fear you felt from waking up every day to another 24 hours of uncertainty, never knowing how your life would play out, it became too much for you. We do not have angst toward you because of this because, whatever it was that plagued you down here, led you to not find peace. It led that bright smile on your face to mask how you felt inside. Although we may feel pain and it may hurt sometimes more than others, we know you have found that peace that you longed for. We are at ease knowing that you are in the serenity you deserved and ever will be.

The next and most important thing I want you to know is that you are loved immensely. I watched as the loss of you shook not only a class, but a community. Everyone loves you with everything in them. Your loss broke us, but it also made us come together. We honor the way you lived your life by following what you believed: that we should spend every moment with the people that we care about and we should love passionately with all we have. In your short time here with us, you showed us the most beautiful outlook on this world and we can do nothing but thank you for that. If not anyone else, I have learned from my few interactions with you to never stop loving this world and what I have. We love the way you loved and we love you no matter what.

The last thing I want you to know is that you will never be forgotten. You were the most beautiful spirits I had the pleasure of seeing in life and that does not leave this earth with you. You are missed tremendously but you are still here with us. I did not know any of you but I see you in every sunset. I see you in every rainbow after a storm and I feel your presence in every wave that crashes on the shore. I did not know any of you but you have impacted my life more than you know and helped me to cherish what really matters. I cannot thank you enough for showing me how to really live this life. I hope you were greeted by the sweetest angels as you are now the most delicate of all. We will see you again one day soon.

Until then,

Your little town back home.