A Bond Beyond Death


I always believed that kindness and compassion were essential to helping one another grow. It was how I made friends so easily, no matter where I went; and it was how I made a lifelong friend in Stefania, a girl who joined our class in Sixth Grade.


Many of our classmates, including a couple of my friends, picked on her because of the way she dressed, but I stood beside her and asked them to leave her be. Stefania’s backstory was a tragic one: her mother had passed away from cancer just a week before, and her father had abandoned them when she was just two. She had moved in with her grandparents, but being old, they had little energy to see to her needs.


I invited her over to my place frequently since the first day we met and taught her everything my parents had taught me. All it took was a little push and Stefania made more friends in the months that followed. We soon became best friends, often hanging out after school at our favourite cafe to spend hours discussing our dreams and other random topics. But even though our friendship at the time was strong, time weathered away our communications over the years as I moved to a different city for work while she remained in our town.


We still maintained regular communications during our first year away from each other, but tragedy followed Stefania once again as her grandfather passed away and her grandmother was diagnosed with cancer just two weeks apart. I wished I could be there for her, but I had several assignments to juggle as a journalist and couldn’t return to my hometown to help her. As months passed, Stefania retreated from calls and even messages until, eventually, there was only silence.


I tried reaching out to her, but it was all to no avail. One of our mutual friends said she had taken her grandmother to a hospital in another city for better treatment, but she had not seen or heard from Stefania ever since then. I wondered what had happened. I looked into the matter and learned news that left me devastated: Stefania had been shot by a mugger. I had lost my best friend…


I took a break from work and returned to my hometown. I met with our mutual friends at the same cafe Stefania and I hung out and reminisced about the simpler times of the past. I wished I could have been there for her; she shouldn’t have had to deal with all that work on her own. And for the first time in my life, I found myself wishing someone dead. The mugger who stole her life…whoever they were, I hoped they’d suffer a painful death.


At that same cafe, oddly enough, I made a new friend who had moved into the town just recently; and she reminded me a lot of Stefania, for although they didn’t look that similar, they both shared a lot of overlapping interests and even spoke almost in the same manner. Lily, the new girl, worked as a waitress at the cafe and always made sure I got a dessert on the house before I left. I wished to decline each time, but she insisted that I have some.


One night, I was walking home alone after getting some groceries when a mugger pulled out a gun on me. He demanded that I hand over everything that I have, and I stood there frozen, unable to think straight. The mugger became frustrated. His grip on the gun became tighter as he stepped forward. I was sure I was about to suffer the same fate as Stefania when, to my surprise, Lily jumped between us. The gun went off and I fell on my back, shaking and out of breath.


Two bullets were fired in the blink of an eye. Still shaking, I turned to Lily, mustering the courage to move forward and check on her. Lily got to her feet and pulled out a blood-coated bullet from the side of her neck. The wound healed instantly and left me speechless. Lily then smiled and kicked over the mugger’s body to reveal that they were dead. I asked her who or what she was, and she told me the strangest answer I could have ever expected to hear.


Lily was actually Stefania, sent back from purgatory to take on the role of a soul reaper for the next three centuries. I felt tears streaming down my face as I hugged Stefania that very instant and pleaded for her forgiveness for not being there for her when she needed me the most. Stefania assured me that there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent what happened, and that she was just thankful for the second chance she had received from the guardians of the afterlife.

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