I met this girl some years ago. We were never really friends but she was really adorable. Last year my friends and I found out she was pregnant. She was twenty years old, just starting college, let’s just say I was chocked. When the baby came there were no pictures or texts saying how great it was to finally see the baby’s face. The first picture of that cute girl came after 4 months. She was sick. There was tubes all over her, and it was sad — but I knew that, no matter what the baby had, my friend was happy, because her baby was there. Her baby was born and, okay, it wasn’t perfect, but it was hers. Everyone wants to have something that is yours.

Some months later came the news: the baby was dead. The baby died. My friend’s daughter no longer exists in this world. We always knew she was sick — probably she was born with a syndrome, which doesn’t mean she was sick, but her condition was of a sick child, with all the tubes, I don’t even know if she ever left the hospital. We never thought she would die. Maybe my friend knew she wasn’t going to live a long and healthy life — maybe she knew that her presence in this world would be short, maybe she knew that even before she was born — but that night I cried, and I bet she did too. It wasn’t all about me. I cried because my friend just lost her baby. My friend had to keep living her life, even though her baby was dead. My friend had to look at the baby stuff everyday and remember that that baby no longer exists as a real person in the real world. You can say whatever you want about her spirit still be alive or something, but the truth is — how could my friend live without her baby? How can we live after someone been taken away from us like this?

I had another friend whose father died. We never knew how, why or when, and he never told us — maybe he doesn’t even knew his father — but I still think that, no matter what happened, there is a scar in my friend’s chest that it’s never going to heal. I don’t know how he deals with this — maybe he pretends it doesn’t exists, but what if? What if he cries at night every week thinking about his mother alone? What if he wants to punch something — anything — just to get rid of the frustration of his own existence? How was the father’s day after his father died? What if he still keep the cards he did for his father at school, thinking someday he will give it to him — or at least show that to someone who wouldn’t laugh or thinks he’s crazy. Maybe he’s waiting for someone to give him a confirmation that he can finally talk about his father. This someone was never me or my friends. We never knew much about this, but my mind can’t stop thinking about his pain — we don’t even talk much now, but I still feel like I need to take away his pain somehow.

And the list goes on and on. I know several people who lost someone special, but my friend’s baby was the worst, because I have a baby too. She doesn’t came out of me, but I do feel we are the same person, we are connected by something bigger than anything else — as if my life had no meaning before her, as if I spent seventeen years being miserable and incomplete, until she came and I found myself. That’s the main reason I cried when my friend’s baby died — because i keep thinking about how terrible it would be if my baby died, i keep putting myself in this situation. I just found out I can’t control. She might go to school one day and at night she doesn’t exist anymore. Things can go wrong. Everything can go wrong and I can’t control and — that’s the part when I’m already sobbing — I can’t stand having no control of this. What if something goes wrong? What if in one minute she’s here and in the next she’s not? How am I supposed to keep living without her? How am I supposed to go through her stuff, how am I supposed to wake up every morning thinking she’s not there, she’s no longer a part of me — the part that I waited so much to have is gone. Now I’m incomplete again. How can we move on after someone we love goes away? How can we build everything from the beginning if we lost our foundation — if we lost everything that was keeping us there?

I don’t like thinking about that, but it keeps coming to me like flashes, and now more than ever. Because I feel lonely. I feel like a part of me — the part I always had — is going away, and I can’t make it stay. I can’t hold all of my pieces together, at least not alone, I’m not strong enough to do this alone. I can think about how hard it was to loose everyone I lost, but the worst of all was losing me in the process. But she’s still here, and everyone says that she’s the one who’s never going to leave. But what if she doesn’t want me around someday? What if I hurt her? What if life take her away from me? I keep having nightmares about leaving her alone, about forgetting her in dangerous places, about seeing her dead and I wake up crying in every single one of them. I wake up in the morning and cry because I’ll not see her for several hours, I feel bad when I go out with my friends because I need to stay with her. She’s the person who’s holding my pieces together — she doesn’t even know that — and I can’t stop thinking: what if she’s gone? What if I’m not around to help? What if she just grow up like everyone else and one day I become unnecessary? I feel like I need to live every single moment with her now because it might never happen again. Because if she’s gone I might go too. There is no point of staying in this world is she’s not there.

I hope my friend doesn’t think the same way.