Yesterday was the birthday of a friend who has passed away. I got this notification email from Facebook and each letter which makes up her name immediately brought along a whirlwind of flashbacks, all washing over my me and my senses in the form of distant memories. It all happened briefly, mere seconds, but it evoked a feeling so profound, as if I was navigating through a storm and eventually bound to arrive in the eerie quietness in the middle, the storm's eye, with a realization repainted anew that... she's passed away. She's no longer in this world.
What remains, is her tomboyish smile in my memory. A smile which is there when I close my eyes for a moment. Imprinted so clearly, as if freshly carved behind my closed eyelids.
We were not that close. I couldn't recall talking to her even once when we were still in the same junior high school because we were never in the same class. After junior high graduation, I moved out to a different high school instead of continuing my study in my former school, whereas my friends at that time mostly stayed. I got to finally know her in my high school years later through our mutual friends, and suddenly every time I hung out with my junior high school friends she was there, the main part of the group, a person everyone in the group got really close with except me. They shared classes together, I didn't.
But I tried to get close to her too.
But we never were. We were not unfriendly toward each other, we just weren't close, is all.
