He has so many things to say to her—one thousand and three, exactly—but she’s gone before he can say them. She escaped from the people hunting her—and a few weeks later, she’s gone. He supposed that he shouldn’t have been surprised—she ran with the wolves (she liked to call them the dogs).

One night, as he’s dreaming, he’s suddenly on an island in the clouds. Pearly white gates hide a mansion—was this Heaven? He wasn’t surprised—Lord knows she didn’t deserve Hell after all she’d been through. Her life had been a dangerous game of survival, and the danger had finally caught up to her.

She’s sitting on the steps in front of the gates, her hands working masterfully in her lap. As he approaches, he realizes that she’s working on a bracelet of sorts. She looks up at him and smiles—but it’s different. Her teeth are as white as the gates and they aren’t crooked anymore. It’s not the smile he remembers.

He remembers a soft, sleepy smile in the mornings at school. He remembers a mischievous grin late at night in his room. He remembers a cute, crooked, gap-toothed smile at lunch. He doesn’t remember this. It’s too perfect.

He sits next to her. A single second and a million years in her company, and all one thousand and three things said and long gone, he stands. She doesn’t—she’s not coming. He’s about to leave when she grabs his wrist.

The bracelet she’d been working on slides onto his wrist. She hugs him then, and he’s not sure if he imagines it or if she really says it, but five words are whispered through the white clouds: “Don’t let time forget me”.

And suddenly, he wakes, alone, in his own bed, and his hand subconsciously moves to his wrist. The knotted bracelet is still on his wrist. It was real. And, in the dead of night, he smiles. He’s got closure, which he never had with his mom, but he has it with her.

To everyone else, she’s just another teenage body, like the others, but to him, she’s everything. She’s the sun and she’s the moon and she’s the stars and she’s the whispers in the wind. She’s the waves that lap gently against the bluff and she’s the lighthouse that guides the ships home. She’s the reason he’s a better person. She’s freedom.

On nights he can’t sleep, he’ll take his Jeep out to the edge of town. On those clear and starry nights, he’ll sit on the hood and stare up at the stars, the words to her favorite song flowing through the night. On rainy nights, he’ll sit alone in his car and listen to the song. He’s been listening to that song a lot lately.

It’s the cloudy, starless nights that he really breaks down. She loved the stars—they used to sneak out and sit on the hood of his Jeep, watching the stars, talking about everything and nothing. She loved rainy nights—those nights they’d sit in the Jeep, curled up in the backseat and stay completely silent, listening to the drops fall against the car. She hated cloudy nights. In fact, that was probably the only thing she hated.

He’s gone back to those gates a few times. She sits there and she smiles at him. He stays for a while, which always feels so long but so short, and she’d listen to him talk. He’d talk about their friends and their school, and she wouldn’t say a word, just listen to him. A lot like she used to.

Every time he leaves, she promises to wait for him so they can go in together and those five whispered words: “Don’t let time forget me”.

At her funeral, he’s still wearing her bracelet. He can feel her watching and smiling at the words engraved in her tombstone—“Don’t let time forget me”—which he might’ve insisted be there. Sometimes at night he’ll go out to the cemetery and place flowers at her grave. He’ll run his fingers over the words and sometimes a tear or two will fall.

One night, he’s almost convinced to tell her to move on, to go into Heaven without him, but she’s always been stubborn. Besides, he likes the fact that someone will be waiting for him. He’ll see that light and hers will be the first face he’ll see.

She told him what dying was like once. She said it was like all the pain she’d ever felt was gone, like it never even existed. Sometimes he wonders if that what he’ll feel like when he dies, but then he thinks that’s morbid and he stops.

The nights without her are long and lonely, and he’s had enough of sitting alone in his Jeep. She’s told him to move on, but those words ring in his head. “Don’t let time forget me”.

She never wore white—but as the days bleed into weeks and the weeks bleed into months, he notices that the black of her clothes is slowly fading to a pale, washed-out grey, until it’s starch white.

He’s lying alone in bed one night, playing with the knotted bracelet that never leaves his wrist, when he feels her presence for the first time in a long time. In the darkness and the stillness of his bedroom, he smiles.

He can feel her lips on his cheek before those words slip through the night. “Don’t let time forget me,”

After that, he never goes back to the gates. He’s sure she moved on and he’s happy for her. Really.

That bracelet never leaves his wrist, and when it’s his time, only a few years after her, it’s still on his wrist. She’s still waiting on those steps when he reaches the pearly gates.

She never took those steps.

She didn’t want him to stop living his life just because she wasn’t there anymore. That was why she stopped taking him to visit her.

She takes his hand and smiles at him, that crooked grin he remembered.

He smiles back and the pearly gates open in front of them.

She leads him up the steps to the gate—and waits a few seconds, staring.

He looks at her and she nods.

With one last breath, they take their first steps into Heaven.

Together.