You are not here.

Her name was Cas. Same primary school. That time of life when so many trees arch over a sun-filled sky, and warmth hangs in the air, amniotic, filled with murmuring laughter, hums and faint calls, now somehow imbued also with sighs, or maybe just a sigh, one long sigh, extending far far back like an umbilical cord to history. Your history. Did someone call it sepia?

And we were the closest of friends. She lived a few streets away. I would visit her . Her parents weren't strict at all, but they weren't not-strict in that bad way. They let us out to play in the park. She smiled so much. I'm sure I did too. And when I see sunlight, sometimes, it's her I see. She was like a sister, a sibling. Her parents even loved having me, maybe felt pity, thinking of the I left so readily to visit them. I had no one else but her. During high school she left the country with her family. Gone, and for a time it truly broke me.

A long time. And one thing I tried, eventually, after realising that I had no way of contacting her, one thing I tried wasn't to think she was gone. Or rather, to think she was truly gone, absolutely gone. She had already been missing for such a time. From me. So I saw these fading memories, and fading smiles, and I imagined instead that she was dead, that she had died, because she had died, the girl I knew then, and I knew at the time as I do now that if I were to see her once more, she would not be the companion who had soothed the most jagged edges of my copper childhood, with whom I had shared so many stoney meadow paths overtaken by moss. She had died the moment I had stopped seeing her. So, that girl, gone, dead, was at least frozen, still, one thing not to be stolen from me, residing in some white-walled, cozy recess in the rooms of my mind. Still with me, purely by her absolute inexistence, her complete vanishment.

She died long ago, and even as I say that - as you have already guessed - I know I tell only half the story.