The Things I Didn’t Say at Your Funeral

The Things I Didn’t Say at Your Funeral

They told me to write a eulogy, something clean, something comforting.

But what comfort can be stitched from the threads of a story we never finished?

I stood in the back pew, silent.

Not because I had nothing to say—

but because I had too much,

and no one ever taught me how to say it with grace.

They read Bible verses you never believed in.

They played a song you hated.

And I nodded like a good mourner,

but inside I was screaming your name,

begging you to wake up and roll your eyes one more time.

I didn’t say it then,

but I’ll say it now:

I hated you for leaving me.

I hated that you didn’t fight harder.

That you didn’t call me.

That you curled into your silence and wore it like a shroud months before you ever stopped breathing.

You ghosted me before you became a ghost.

You were the first person who saw me.

Not the polished version, not the mask.

You saw the ugly things,

the cracked mirror reflections,

the poems I tore up before anyone else read them—

and you told me they were beautiful anyway.

I wanted to say thank you.

But I didn’t.

I thought we had time.

You weren’t perfect.

You hurt people. You hurt me.

I never said that either.

There were nights you drowned in your own bitterness and tried to take me with you.

Words sharper than razors.

Cold wars that lasted weeks.

I wish I had told you then:

I forgave you for all of it.

I didn’t say how your laugh made rooms brighter,

or how you hummed off-key just to make people uncomfortable,

or how you never met a rule you didn’t challenge.

I didn’t say that your absence feels like walking on a tilted floor—

like I’m leaning toward something that isn’t there anymore.

Your mother cried so quietly at the funeral.

I held her hand, and she whispered,

"He never really talked to us."

I wanted to scream,

"He did. You just didn’t hear him."

You spoke in smoke signals and scratched lyrics on notebook margins.

You screamed with silence, with withdrawal, with laughter at the wrong moments.

You said so much—

and no one knew how to listen.

They dressed you in that stiff black suit.

You would’ve hated it.

You wanted to be buried in jeans and band tees,

your headphones in,

a smirk on your lips that said you were in on the cosmic joke.

But no one asked me.

No one thought I’d know.

Maybe I didn’t even know as much as I thought.

Still, I should’ve fought for you.

Here’s what I would’ve said at your funeral if my voice had worked:

"I loved him.

Not in the way people want love to look—neat and sweet and Facebook-post-ready.

I loved him messily.

Like blood on the knuckles after punching a wall.

Like shouting at the rain because it won’t stop.

Like waiting at a bus stop that never had a bus scheduled in the first place.

He was my friend.

My mirror.

My unresolved prayer."

Here’s what I would’ve whispered if I had one more minute with you:

“You were enough.

You were so fucking enough.”

And I would’ve held your face in my hands,

made you look at me—really look—

until you saw yourself through my eyes,

not the warped ones you borrowed from your past.

They buried your body.

But not the words.

Those stayed with me.

Heavy, bitter, glowing like coal.

So I carry you.

Every day.

In missed phone calls,

in songs that sound like you,

in dreams that leave me crying at 2 a.m.

The things I didn’t say at your funeral?

I say them now.

Aloud.

To the wind,

to the shower tiles,

to my pillow at night.

And maybe,

just maybe,

you hear them.

Maybe you always did.