The coffin was a bitter red color. It was made out of a shiny mahogany wood, stained with tears and bleeding love. Inside laid a little boy with golden hair and glasz eyes. He was too young to be dead. Dressed in a stiff, sky blue tuxedo within the stifling satin. A little girl walked up to the tiny wooden box with a single forget-me-not clutched in her tiny hands.

She had short dark hair and extremely dark eyes. She was smaller than most girls her age. Wearing a simple black dress paired with flats encasing her tiny feet, she looked rather morbid. Without a word spoken or a tear shed, she placed the pale flower into the boy's cold fingers. Taking one last look at her best friend, she sighed and walked away.



Summers there were hot, followed by a cool, bitter fall. Mothers dressed their children heavily in wool and flannel. Children bore pinkish red noses from the biting winds and annual colds, flues, and childhood viruses. The fall of 1999 was no different. This was a big fall for some, unimportant to others. A girl with short dark hair walks into a classroom for the first time, and a boy decides to greet her. Neither of them know how much of an impact either would be on each other. She was small, developing at a year younger than her classmates. he was tall, lanky, even for a kid. Wearing an over sized Cubs hat and jeans, he stuck out his grubby hand. "My name is Jonathan. I'm four years old."



Taking the hand, she shook it. Another girl, however, walked up to the newly formed duo and decided she wanted part in this friendship too. Soon, after this moment, they were inseparable.



They grew up together, preschool, kindergarten, all the way up to first grade. I would also like to say they grew up and either of the girls married the boy. However, all stories have some sort of sad ending.



I can never remember the exact date, but I remember the events of the day like anything else...



ONE FALL DAY- 2001



I was 6. Shannon was 7. Jonathan....gosh...I forgot already...He was either. he wasn't outside, so Shannon and I thought nothing of it. Thinking he was just sick, we decided it was no big deal, and played like normal. It was no big deal.

Right?

Right???

We were too young to know...weren't we? Too young to understand, to grasp how eerie the day was, how cold it was.

Every time I think back on this day...it only gets more obvious...How wrong things were that day, and how we were too young to notice in the slightest. The weather was unusually cool, going from the low 60's to the mid 40's. We thought nothing of it, it just meant wearing a coat and long pants. It was dark, gloomy, and despondent. The air carried the faint scent of rain...but none came. The winds were particularly harsh, and the sky was a cross between gray and black. I never noticed. She didn't either...We played like we always did, on the slides and running around. The bell rang and we took our seats, winded and scarlet faced as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary detected out of our minds. Nothing.

Not even the way our teacher was crying during English, or the way the principal looked like every step he made was like wearing chains around his ankles. Not until show and tell, did we really know.

Like every stupid class, we had the whole 'magic object' concept, the holder of the object speaks. As she sat down, almost half the kids raised their hand anxiously, wanting to show off trinkets and contraptions. Taking a deep breath, she looked at us all, but it felt like she was just looking at Shannon and I. "Boys and girls, you remember Jonathan, right?" she asked, a catch in her throat as she said his name.

We looked at one another. Of course we knew Jonathan. He was our best friend. Why did she even have to ask? We nodded slightly, wondering why the teacher was asking such absurd questions.

Drawing in another breath, her eyes glazed over as she spoke quietly, as if the dead could hear us. "Jonathan went shopping with his parents last night and, well, there was a large mirror...and...it fell on him. He died last night in the hospital."

Shannon and I looked at each other. It wasn't possible. Jonathan was OUR best friend. He couldn't be gone! We weren't done with him yet! It simply was not possible. She was wrong. Jonathan was just sick. He would be back tomorrow. He would, we promised each other with one look.

But he never was.

Two days had passed, and my parents, for some reason, dragged me to a place where everyone dressed in black and cried over a red box. Shannon was there, wearing a black dress similar to my own. We didn't understand the last time we'd be seeing our best friend, he's be lying in a casket. I had a forget-me-not. It was Jonathan's favorite shade of blue. She looked just as confused as I probably did. We never knew. We never knew...The preacher started talking, and I started nodding off. After what must have been twenty minutes, we got into a huge line leading up to the coffin. Confused, we waited, and waited.

And waited.

People cried, everyone cried.

Except for us.

How were we supposed to know?

It must have felt like forever, but finally it was our turn. I looked at him once...and I finally got a glimmer of what really happened. Thin, bright red cuts outlined his face and his hands, cleaned of the blood, but still a brilliant shade of ruby. I placed the flower into his cut up hands and walked away, Shannon in tow.

END FLASHBACK

We grew up, I went to a different school, then moved to a different town. We forgot about him for so long. I even forgot his name. i was so easy to forget him because I wanted so badly to forget the hurt. Like a wave, it came crashing down on me one night. My best friend in the world had died. And left me here all alone to fend for myself. The day I finally remembered. The day I finally faced it, I cried. Jonathan was one of my first friends. He built castles with me with Mega-blox, he made Frosty the snow man with PlayDoh! He, Shannon, and I were going to grow up, and even when I moved, we would be best friends forever. Go to college, and die with each other. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. He was too young to die, I was too young to understand. Too young...Too young to want to try.

Jonathan was never forgotten again.

It was the fall of 2010. Cold, warm, an Indian summer, nothing was out of the normal. The little girl has grown. Still the runt of her age, her short hair as grown in thick and long. her eyes lightened to a dark hazel. Instead of dresses she wears jeans and t-shirts, Converse encasing her still tiny feet. She moved away from her friend, but they still keep contact. She has changed very much. But now, every fall, every day, she thinks at least once about that little boy in the mahogany coffin. She remembers exactly who he was, and exactly how he left. She never forgot. She just didn’t want to remember. With a soft smile gracing her lips, she remembers, and moves on.