When we were young, we’d spend weekends together. In and out of feeding your pets, checking the eyes of all your animals, and making sure all the blinds were closed, he’d pop in with bits of advice.

“Did you know, Olivia, that practicing the piano just thirty minutes a day could make you an expert? Imagine if you just gave something thirty minutes a day, how much it could change your life?”

And I didn’t know then. I just knew that you had an exchange student from France and in less than a month your father taught him how to play the guitar. They’d sit out on the front porch on late summer nights, strumming away and making you wish there were another way to reach him…

Before I even really knew you, your height intimidating my tiny eighth-grade stature, he came to our class. He called on each and every one of us, and strummed along, and asked for lines, and wrote on the board, and made us the string of words that would build our first-ever creative writing Class Poem. Our first… and our last. How I remember his sweet soul, his kindness… his willingness to be there for that shy soul who stood behind her six-foot frame… the frame he gave to you, the one he shaped you with.

And I didn’t know then. All I knew was that he loved you.

Your mom told me about the dream she had of your brother’s name. How she screamed at him for coming up with such a thing… and then placed it upon him, for the sake of your father. Everything, always, was for the sake of your father.

That tall-as-a-giant, skinny-as-a-rail Panamanian frame. Your June videos standing in the Panama rain in front of his childhood home. One of twelve, he swam in that canal, knowing some of his friends had died… he swam anyway, survived, and made you. You. Strong behind the shyness, my always-there, always-and-forever loving best friend.

And I didn’t know then, that video-viewing summer. Just that you were there, home with him, and that he loved you.

His thick brown-framed glasses and record collection. The wedding invitation and picture-of-black-man my mother painted, framed with his hands in that little back-porch room, Bellas Artes. “Te amo, Ita,” his heritage shared across the generations. And that picture you put up, you smaller than the body of the guitar he strummed for your infant sleep… How he loved you.

And I knew then… on my wedding day. But it didn’t matter. The white frame on my wedding invite? A gift that would last forever. Even after he was gone.

When grief takes over, life become a series of ‘What Ifs.’ What if I had loved him more? What if I had taken him to the dentist? What if I had come one day earlier? What if he never met my mother? What if he never joined the Army? What if he never knew what it felt like to have a drink? What if I had gone alone?

It will never end. It will never, ever. Ever end.

And I knew then… that day you sent me the texts. When I called and heard your hollow voice. That it was over. That all the pain that had sloshed in his mouth and washed out his heart and that left you with your ‘What Ifs…’ I knew about the demons. About the emptiness that trails like a shadow at the back of your beautiful life. About the love that will never die, just like he would never die, because he swam anyway, and beat the Panama Canal. He swam, sang, fought, and lived for you. He swam anyway, swallowing his demons, making you the amazing woman you are today.

What if he never swam? What if he never made it to the shore?

And I knew then… He swam anyway. He swam for you.

Keep swimming, my friend. Keep swimming.