She faltered, and I reached my hand out to catch her as if I could stop this from settling down on her. I could see it, the tensing of her muscles, her bones even, as each of them twitched up from her feet to the expression on her face. So many emotions were printed across her eyes, it almost seemed blank. As if this was the moment when she finally left herself, gone from this world and onto the next.

The next moment her face broke, her mouth cracked open into a hoarse cry as she began to crumble from the inside out. Her knees gave in and she stumbled to the floor, her beautifully curled hair a blanket as her tears began to drop. She curled up on the floor, the same one that was the stage for our board games last night, and hugged her knees in so tightly as if to suffocate this moment that had come upon us. She look so small then, a fragment of imagination as we ponder what could be in moments of fear. Except this isn’t what could be, because it’s instead what is. He died, he is dead, and any imagination has been forced into the reality of this moment.

“No, no, no…” she whispered in the palms of her hands. “No, it’s not true.”

This is when I began to cry. I felt a tear slip down my face as I watched her, in slow motion, break. I stood there, the sun beaming through the glass of the door and shining on her like a spotlight as she sobbed into her knees. I stood there and watched, because there was nothing I could do to fix this for her. Nothing I could say that would make her eyes stop shining from the tears that came quickly.

We both stayed there in that moment, frozen in the time that had caught up with us, and cried into the warm sunlight that surrounded us.