She breathed life into Krystal’s world, she colored the sunset and gave the sunrise it’s mellow glow. She was the blue of the sky and the inky black of twilight, and Krystal was in love with her. Present tense. Even if she was gone. Parts of Krystal reminder herself of the other girl. Parts of the world did, too. The colors that painted everything, shades of sunlight, the dome of the sky, the stain of grass on pant legs. A permanent reminder of her was everywhere, and there was no way to escape her. Krystal loves it, and hates it. She loves that she sees the other girl in everything, in the children playing on the swing at the playground and in the pouring of rain on a stormy day, but she also hates it because it’s a reminder that she’s gone, and that she’s only a memory becoming blurred at the edges, beckoning sadly at her from deep within her heart. 

    The funeral service didn’t take as long as Krystal’d expected. The open casket viewing, however, was a completely different story. The event seemed to stretch on for hours and hours, and the people streamed in like a flood into the room. She didn’t want to go up and see her yet, laying peaceful and tranquil, nestled neatly inside of the coffin and surrounded with various arrangement of flowers. On the TV mounted to the tops of the funeral home’s blandly painted walls, a slideshow of various pictures was playing, and the snapshots of memories and remembrance flitted through Krystal’s empty gaze. She sat alone, in the front row of seats set up for the guests to sit down and chat amongst themselves, and watched with a blank expression and a numb feeling deep in the pit of her stomach, while people huddled around the black box with sorrow lacing their brows and hands folded in prayer. For even though it felt like Sulli was still out there, living and breathing and letting her existence overflow into Krystal’s emptying soul, she was just a cold body and a memory. 

    Krystal was wrong when she thought that she’d feel something when she walked into the room, the first guest to arrive, and gave the obligatory string of apologies to Sulli’s family, who in return told her that it was a shame that she and Sulli never lasted long enough. Krystal thought about telling them that Sulli gave her more than a lifetime in the short year she spent as Sulli’s girlfriend, but she decided to hold her tongue and bow thanks to them instead. She had been expecting to feel her lover’s presence watching over her from above, or something supernatural of the sort. But Krystal had felt no such thing, and the only thing she did experience was the deepening hole of the fact that Sulli would not be returning, that Sulli was no more. She lived on only in Krystal’s memory, in Krystal’s dreams, in Krystal’s broken, shattered heart.

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