We still stand in the places we once stood with you but everything is different. There is a shift in the atmosphere and the air we inhale is filled with discomfort as we exhale deafening silence.

It's hard breathing with corrupted lungs and a spiteful mind with you gone; at least when you were here there was someone who complained and said the bitter truth about our lives. Now I'm choking up from keeping it all bottled up. 

Maybe that was how you felt. You kept it all in until overflowed. Except you didn't let your frustration out through youthful violence. Rather than emptying it out all at once you let it drip slowly through crude language and morose thoughts. 

"Do you ever feel like we're just fucking up our lives?" you asked aloud one day, to no one in particular. "Fucking up our lives and everyone else's?

You watched the smoke rise from your cigarette that twirled in your fingers. The ashes that began to fall to the ground would get swiped by the wind and blown away. Lucky for us, so we wouldn't have to see the ashes litter the ground.

No one was listening but me, or at least I think since I was the only one looking at you when you spoke. Everyone else was giggling at some picture on someone's phone. 

"I think, I think that we shoul-" you began, but a gust of wind took away the next words from your mouth, and I only saw your lips move up and down.

"What was that?" I asked once the wind had died down. I shouldn't have said it so loudly, because suddenly everyone's attention was on you, awaiting to hear your next words.

You paused, watching me out of the corner of your eye but quickly looked away and back at the cigarette in your bare hands. Maybe it was my lifeless eyes from my disinterested gaze that made you nervous.

"Nothing," you eventually grumbled, "just thinking out loud to myself"

We dryly chuckled at your words and scoffed at your secretive nature, but no one questioned what you were going to say.

Oh how I wish I found the words that the wind took away, where has it taken them? They held bitter truth and the outcome of our souls, didn't they? Why did you choose to let the wind take them away where we cannot hear them? We should find those words, but perhaps we will never find out;

Because all we do now is breathe in and out this cigarette smoke in the daunting air.