To Cecily.

Today felt like the first day of Summer, yet the city has never been this cold. 

Cecily left us, they write. A Facebook post, a heart, some confused words of a friend who tells her Goodbye. And here comes the truth, who turned today's blue sky into a huge black hole. No way out.

Cecily is dead. 

I didn’t see this coming. We all knew she was ill. But I’ve read her story, I’ve listened to it: in the past two years, Cecily chewed death and then spat it. She talked about it, she wrote about, she painted about it. She exorcised the demon, made it human… vulnerable.

Because after all death, the thought of death, is only deadly to the living: it can only affect us when we are alive. The fear of it, mostly, its overshadowing presence. But in her words, in the conversations she had, death had the same relevance of the last nail polish she had bought or the horoscope of the day. 

She didn't only fight it, she opposed it, she denied the disease its deadly status, by talking about it and exposing it for what it is. Cecily was ill, yet she went to University. She kept on painting, cooking, writing and she put the spectrum of death in a corner. Making it look insignificant, ridiculous. Almost as if it wasn't there. And here's why these words hurt so much.
Cecily is dead. And we can't, we don't want to believe it. 

Just take a look at her drawings, they are more eloquent than words. Bright colors moving fluidly within black, heavy lines. That was Cecily, that was her life. She found a way to shine in the shadow, to create color within the darkness. 

And as her lungs collapsed she bragged about the quality of her new hair and wrote blog posts about Lana Del Rey's zodiacal profile. She refused to allow death to interfere with her life as long as she was alive. And isn’t this, after all, the only way to avoid death?

She made us proud. You probably think that her death showed us our vulnerability. That she is introduced us, for the first time, to the idea of death. Us, little more than teenagers, helplessly affected by the syndrome of immortality.

But you're wrong. She actually showed us how strong we can be, she taught us not to be afraid of what's to come. In a way she made us ready for life, grateful for every second of it, the good and the bad. 

And here we are Cecily, our lives barely touched, yet you left a scar. No, I’ll reword this: you left a mark. Dead or alive, you are not easy to forget. And you won’t be forgotten.