• The moment I saw him - saw his body - I knew that he was dead. I knew that I was starting at a corpse. It wasn't the lack of movement in his chest, the absence of the gentle push of shallow sleep-breaths against his shirt. It wasn't the color of his skin, pale but still looking warm and slightly radiant in the late morning's pure, warm sun, as if his soul still lingered upon and caressed his smooth skin. The second I walked into the room, I could tell there wasn't a person lying on the bed, but dead weight. Nothing but the gradually decomposing carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen lying in a heap on his bed.
    For a moment, nothing in the room moved. Neither his heart or mine; my breath taken away like I had just walked into a vacuum. Right then, two corpses were in the room; in that instant, I died. Or at least a part of me did.
    I felt bad at the levity with which I turned the knob and opened the door, expecting a living and boisterous human being to be sitting on the bed, not a fossil. I felt like I had broken the sanctity that he had created in his death.
    The realization wasn't painful. I didn't cry or gasp. I simply stepped my feet on the carpet of his room and stopped in the doorway. The first emotion, the split second of discovery, was fear and surprise. It was immediate. I needed nothing to tell me that he was dead. It struck me immediately. The second emotion was a slow fall from the point of immediate anxiety and surprise. A metaphorical "Oh..." of my emotions. Not the realization, but the acceptance of it.
    It was him, I mean, him! I can't say that it's too horribly surprising. Sure, we had laughed the day before together, and I know that he enjoyed life greatly at points, but all in all I could never put a pin on him. He was two things at once, a smiling face that hid his deeper, untangible and hidden forms. He lived a facade which I could never, ever see through. When you don't know a person, you can't tell what they will do. Truly, I didn't know him. Truly, this isn't a surprise.
    He looked beautiful laying there, cold and hard as marble. A beautiful Greek statue. His hair was washed and his body immaculate. His clothes were neat. His room was clean. Pedicured feet sprawled bare out from the body. Don't call this a happenstance, because I know - I know him - he did this on purpose. It was a final insult to everyone who had ever said anything about his appearance. It was a pie in the face to his mother for each time she'd told him to clean his room.
    Oh yes, it hurt. It hurt badly. It hurt worse than to lose a friend simply through the falling out of a relationship, or being broken up with by an adored partner. This was the ultimate abandonment. In some ways I felt sorrow for him leaving, and in others jealousy and rage at being left behind.
    The funeral was worse - ten times worse. He was dressed in a suit, another facade that was even more false and illegal - for it was not put on by him in a sincere attempt to hide, but put on by someone else in an attempt to allieviate the pain caused by the fact that he was cunning. He was cunning enough to do this, resolute enough to carry through with it. He was bold, my god he was bold. This wasn't a petty rebellion like stealing, or cheating or flipping someone off. This was the ultimate rebellion, and as I looked down at his powdered and fake face, laying awkwardly in the coffin, I laughed a little. I knew this was what he wanted. Through fighting back tears, I laughed.
    Since then, I've visited his grave every year - on the anniversary of his death. The day of the funeral, I left a since yellow rose in his casket for him. On it, a strip of paper was taped. I've done this every single year on that day.

    Today in the tenth year of this horrible ritual. Today I am ten years younger, reliving the moment of realization. Reliving a life and reliving a death, both which occured in an instant. Today, I promised myself, was my last flower. A yellow rose, as always.
    I didn't really have a reason for the yellow rose - it doesn't have a significance at all. Maybe I just plucked it out of a bouque at random. Maybe he liked Crysanthynyms.

    I kneeled down as if to tell the gravestone a secret. It was austere and only gave his name and the years he lived. He wouldn't have liked this, I told myself. But if he was alive, there would be no gravestone to see. I patted the gravestone like his head of blond hair, atop a lightbulb of the golden radiance of his character. I missed him.
    "I've been bugging you alot, old buddy," I fingered the rose in my hands, "I figure, it's been ten years... today. I ought to stop. I ought to leave you alone," when a droplet fell onto my hand, I realized I was crying.
    I didn't say goodbye. I couldn't. I just left the rose on the grave.

    Around it, the paper read, "For a friend. For a life cut short. For the perfect ending, for eternity. for a brother"