I didn't know him. 

Not his face. Not his voice. Not the way he walked into a room or what made him laugh until he couldn't breathe. I knew none of it. I still don't.

And yet yesterday. I couldn't move past it. There's something that happens when you hear about a fifteen year old boy who is suddenly just... gone. Something in you goes quiet. Not the kind of quiet that feels peaceful. The kind that feels like the air got knocked out of the world a little.

I kept thinking about his mom.

The last morning. Whether she was rushing around, distracted, half-awake with coffee in her hand. Whether she hugged him or just called out a quick goodbye from another room. She had no idea. How could she. None of us walk out the door thinking that could be the last time.

And now she has to live inside that morning for the rest of her life. I couldn't let my mind stay there too long. I had to pull back. Because even the edge of that thought was too heavy and I'm just a stranger. She's living at the center of it. Every single day from here on.

There's a saying-parents are buried in the ground, but children are buried in the heart. I've known those words for a long time. But I don't think I ever really felt them until yesterday. A grave in the earth goes quiet eventually. But what she's carrying doesn't. It just becomes part of how she breathes.

I run a Taekwondo school here in Brick. My students grow up in this township. We are part of this community. Its schools, its streets, its families. Jackson was part of that same community. Even though our paths never crossed.

And now there's a shape missing from it that wasn't missing before. I found myself praying last night. Not with words, really. More like just... sitting with the weight of it and sending whatever I had toward his family. 

Hoping that somehow across all that grief, in that house, in whatever unbearable silence has settled there now they might feel that they are not completely alone. That people who never even knew Jackson's name are holding them anyway.

I don't know if that means anything. I hope it does. I am not writing this to say something meaningful. I don't have anything meaningful to say.

I am writing it because he was here, and he was fifteen, and that matters. Because someone should say his name. Because his mom loved him in that complete, all consuming way that changes who you are and that love doesn't disappear just because he did.

Jackson was here.

I am so sorry he's gone.