Her eyes were reminiscent of the night before a revolution. Those two beautiful hazel irises I had come to know so well were suddenly rendered unfamiliar by the dark gaze that haunted me now. In the kitchen, we sat facing one another, backs erect, thin lines for mouths. Conversations over the dinner table about subject matters less grim previously felt like home to me. She previously felt like home to me. But now, as we struggled to wade through a stifling silence, trapped by these sunflower-yellow walls, an ominous feeling pierced my heart and I averted my eyes. I felt her gaze burn through my bones, prodding me to speak. How could I meet her eyes? How could I tell her that her only son, my only best friend, would never return to the shelter of this home?

            Mouth parched, I cleared my throat.

“He’s dead.”

I spat the words out like a venomous liquid that had been plaguing my taste buds for years. It was the first time I’d uttered the statement, the first time I’d accepted it as fact.

The sound of gunshots at the other end of the city resonated through the evening air as we, a group of mourners with hardened hearts, placed flowers and old photographs by the streetlight where he perished. That chilly November night, South Street became more than a Philadelphia shopping mecca. That night, South Street became to us a perpetual reminder of him, of who he was, of the person he would have grown to become, of everything we had lost. The face of another black boy robbed of his life would appear in the newspaper the following day, snagging the square that housed the photograph of my own black boy. Another would come after him, and the cycle would continue forevermore. I pondered this as I gently placed a copy of Tupac’s poem, Jada, on top of a bouquet of roses. He’d recited the poem for me a year before while we were sitting in the middle of his high school’s baseball field, listing the things we appreciated most. Those sacred words, if ever they should form a bond with the wind and elope from their current position, would carry with them the vestiges of my heart. Silently vowing to return to the streetlight once a month, I turned away from the silver pole to greet the darkness, hands stuffed into the pockets of my worn jean jacket, a mind exploding with rage.

As expected, his memory faded from the thoughts of the community, who now had to reserve space in their prayers for the new face plastered in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Following the burial, his mother and I were not surprised when the delivery of condolence cards ceased, when the flowers plotted beneath the streetlight wilted, when the neighbors stopped placing their hands on our shoulders in support. I’d acted in the play multiple times before, committing the stage directions to heart and mulling over the same horrid theme: life goes on. For as long as it’s been around, the play’s scenes have remained the same - only the actors change.

            It wasn’t until his high school newspaper asked me to write a eulogy for him that I began to feel uncomfortable with this accepted recursion. What could I construct that would differentiate him from the sea of faces that Philadelphia had recognized, only to subsequently forget? The lines of his story would blur with the lines of the stories of others who came before him, thrusting him into the ranks of faceless corpses distinguished only by the blackness of their skin and the curtness of their lives. I bluntly refused to eulogize my best friend in print, stating that he couldn’t afford immortality while his heart was beating, and he certainly couldn’t pay for it now.

            That evening, I sat quietly in the midst of his high school’s baseball field, turning the notion of justice over and over in my hands. I examined it from every angle, searching for a justification in the notoriety of the word. I yearned for a list of reasons to console me, to tell me that yes, 500 words or less could bring back his smile. I thirsted to know that the void lurking over my shoulder each evening would disappear if I scribbled down our fondest memories, if I described how his favorite white t-shirt smelled like the beach on a Sunday morning. As the evening dissolved into night, the stars told me that the only words appropriate to immortalize him are not even my own. I dusted my hands off on the side of my pants and turned to face the darkness once again. This time as I walked away, I repeated the final lines of Tupac’s Jada to myself, thinking that words, and words alone, are bulletproof.

You bring me to climax without sex

And you do it all with regal grace

You are my heart in human form

A friend I could never replace.