When I was fifteen, I was generally unfamiliar with the agonies of seeing someone die. Now, that isn’t to say that I had never experienced loss or had never been through grief, nor does it mean I had never watched someone slowly wither away from cancer or addiction; it simply means I had never witnessed a death.
	I had been with him for six months. We’d gone through so many things together; I watched him struggle as they shut off his little brother’s life support, he watched me fall apart when my best friend betrayed me; we had been through so much. So when he introduced me to a girl he was friends with, I was guarded. She felt like bad news, but I befriended her for him. We spoke for awhile, and eventually she confessed to me that she was in love with him. At the time, I had nothing in my mind regarding losing him, especially not to her. I told her I had no interest in losing the person I loved most at the time, and she exploded.
	Over the next few weeks she was silent, and before I knew it, she had posted my personal information all across the net. My family knew, strangers would recognize my usernames, it was a nightmare. She had outed me publicly.
	Ashton was supportive. He was there for me. I got through it. But the girl.. She wouldn’t have it. She took it to a place where her mentality was “If I can’t have him, nobody can.”
	Ash and I skyped a lot and we had left our call open that morning after I’d gone to school. While I was away, she had decided to take everything from him. He came from a family that would kill him, literally, if they knew he was gay; Not to mention that he was dating someone like me, especially if they knew I was open about it.
The girl did something unforgivable that day.
She found his full name, his address, his phone number, everything; in colloquial terms.. She doxxed him. His parents knew everything. I had left my phone at home that day, so when I got back, I had no idea what had happened. He had texted me all day, that he was scared, afraid. Needed me. That his mom had called him and told him she was going to beat it out of him, that she would fix him if it killed him.
He was terrified, and then he fell into a place where it felt like he had nothing to live for; so when I got home that day, I opened my bedroom door to the image of a gun in his mouth, his hand on the trigger, a sound I’ll never forget, and the afterimage of pink mist against blue wallpaper that is singed into my retinas.
My first instinct was to pick up my phone; I knew what to do, how to do it, and even though it pained me to do so, I dialed 911. My voice was so quiet the woman on the line asked me to repeat myself four times. It took me four times to strangle the words out of my mouth loud enough for her to hear -
	“I’ve just witnessed a suicide.”
	She asked for my address, and I told her his. Told her where his bedroom was, what colour shirt he was wearing. She told me they were on the way, and I hung up before she could ask me for my name. I said goodbye, closed the skype call, and killed my computer before stumbling into my living room.
	My mom wasn’t home. She’d gone out, god knows what for - I was alone. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my cellphone, my texts. So I sat down in the middle of the hallway and cried. For hours, it felt like, I couldn’t breathe. Every time I closed my eyes it was the aftershock of what I’d seen; pink mist on a blue wall.
I had.. Nothing. No way to contact his family, or find out what happened. I waited for someone, anyone, to show up at my house and tell me I wasn’t allowed at the funeral, I was waiting for it; but in an even crueler sense of abandonment - nobody ever told me it was happening.
I slept with music on every night after because I couldn’t stop myself from waking up screaming; even now I sometimes have the same nightmare. I had that nightmare for months; Ashton, gunshot, pink mist on a blue wall.
Baby blue. The colour makes me sick, now. For months, he’d confessed to me that it was his favourite colour, that it was the only reason he’d had his mom let him sleep in the nursery after his brother had passed away - everything about him was baby blue. His eyes, his paintbrushes, most of his clothes, his shoes, even his hair at one point; they all shared that soft, touchable tone of blue. I used to love that colour. It used to be my favourite, too.
	But now when I think of him, all I see is pink mist on a blue wall.