I remember standing with him at the top of the valley, laughing like mad hatters as the echo’s from our yells disappeared, taking all the pent up rage and anger with them. Tears ran down our faces as we cackled at the base of the pylon. We stared down at the city below and took in deep lungfuls of the crystal clear mountain air.
He turned towards me, his long dark hair flicking round like a sabre parrying a lunge.
“We could of course,” he said with a mischievous grin, “go down quietly and calmly”
A pause, a merest flickering in time.
“NAH!” we shouted.
We sped down the trail weaving in and out like two demons after a soul. Gray peacock tails flicked from our tires as we slid round corners with no thought to the future, as the stones and dust from our free ride down left behind the only remains of our passing.
We leapt over any annoyance on the track and the claws of the thorn bush’s were left grabbing at empty air as we fled madly down the track. We finally skidded to a stop at the bottom of the track with a spray of gravel, mud and sand.
“Alright!” We yelled as our palms slapped together.

That image of our hands together in the air swam in front of my eyes, as tears of a different sort from those a week ago ran down my face, as the coffin of my closest friend was lowered into the ground like the ending to a bad story.

“I’ll ring you tonight” he had called as we went our separate ways home. He may as well said never. Five minutes down the road a car doing a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour came over a hill and broke my friends head open like a stone impacting into the open mouth of a volcano.
Death had been instantaneous. The drunken driver had paid his price. Three months of constant turmoil and pain racking along his body. He deserved it.

That night I sat at my desk, thinking “Why, why?, I should of stopped him, made him talk a bit so the car could of missed him.”
But what’s done is done, I can’t control the past, I never will. We must leave our past behind, but never forget it. Because if we forget we will make the same mistakes and each time more people will die.

The sun beams down on the rows of grey headstones then slips behind a cloud, and a dark cloak slips over the land. It is four months since my friend died, his life ended the way a cloud hides the sun. The green oak trees surrounding the cemetery have since turned yellow and the wind has a crueller edge to it.
I have read the inscription many times and its meaning still eludes me, it makes no more sense to me than it did a week after his funeral four long months. Four months of misery, tears and anger, The day to day toil of making it through each day, each hour, each minute and every small yet eternal second is far more than I can stand. I come here to sit, to look and to remember.
Grey seems to be the colour of choice here, the graves, the surrounding wall and the hard grey sky all clash wildly with the bright green grass and in Summer and Spring, the trees.
I don’t know how many times I have come here, It is a mystery, It is always quiet here and there is never anyone around. Never. It is such a hard word, so final, so devastating to ones soul, as if to leave it black and charred fires of hell.