I strolled down the beach’s shore for the seventh time that hour, occasionally stopping to relish the feeling of the cool waters washing over my feet in a mixture of salt and foam. I dig my toes in at this time, marveling at how weird it feels to have the cold wet sand envelop my feet, and yet how warm it feels nonetheless.

I pause from my lone walk on the deserted beach, bend down, and grasp a small, deep blue, smooth piece of stone…a shard of sea glass. A single piece of what used to be a magnificent piece of work—perhaps a glass bottle with a message inside, thrown out to the sea’s open waters?

She’d always done that—scrawl a stupid, useless message on a piece of scrap paper, roll it up, stuff it down a thin neck of a green bottle and cork the head on, and just fling it out. Granted, the bottle barely flew out ten feet or so, but she’d have so much fun doing it, and she’d made me do it, too. She said that if you wrote a wish and let it roll away into the ocean, a mermaid would find it and help your wish come true. It was such a silly little children’s tale.

But the thing is, the way she said it made me, the skeptic of skeptics, believe in it too. That’s why we would often spend hours writing countless wishes and stuff them in the bottles we’d emptied over the week. Then we’d take it down to this place, and throw as hard as we could.

I stared at the blue shard in my open palm, which glistened in the sun’s rays with seven shades of clear indigo. Indigo, just like her eyes.

Her eyes were a marvel on their own—they could display so much emotion with just one glance. When she was happy, they would glow brilliantly with joy, like the moon reflected on the sea. When she felt pain, they would glaze over from the despair that she felt, and grow hazy and unclear—the eyes that I hated the most.

But she would never show me those magical eyes once more, and never again would I settle my gaze upon those orbs that pleaded at me to do another completely ridiculous thing with her. I would never feel the pressure of her iron grip that tugged at my arm towards a foolish activity, and I would never feel the burn of her glare when I didn’t relent. I wouldn’t hear her voice, soft and childish, yet burning with an intensity that a girl her age shouldn’t possess, calling out to me, “come on, it’s fun!”

I wouldn’t ever see my little sister again, the precious pearl that was literally one in a million.

She was the one who always laughed that I would be dancing atop her grave when she died, and she was the one that wiped my tears away while struggling to hold hers in. She was the one who told me never to die, but wouldn’t hesitate to throw hers away if it meant someone else’s happiness. She was the one who fed pieces of bread to that abandoned puppy in the park, and the one who flipped over a penny on the floor so that it would bring good luck to someone else.

She was the one whom I loved so dearly, but left without even saying goodbye. She was the one who said that one always has to say goodbye before leaving, because then the other person wouldn’t wait forever for you when you didn’t come back. But she didn’t even follow her own rule.

She was foolish, she was an irrevocable idiot, but she was my sister. She was, is, and always will be my sister, the one who would crack jokes even on her dying day.