Three weeks.

Mar 27, 2008 - 10:03 AM PST

Three weeks and one day.
That's the amount of time it has been since her accident.
Three weeks, 23 hours, and seven minutes.
That's the exact time that it has been since she died.
March 5, 2008.
Three weeks until her 18th birthday.
That was yesterday.
She was so young.
So...driven.

What am I supposed to do?
Every morning I wake up, my first thoughts are of her.
She was my best friend.
She is my best friend.

It just doesn't seem real.
Like it wasn't supposed to happen.
I know it happened, but something tells me this wasn't supposed to be the way it ended.
You know?

Yesterday was her birthday.
Yesterday was the three week anniversary of her death.
Anniversaries and birthdays are supposed to be happy occurrences.
Not anything like how it was yesterday.

I took three of my favorite pictures of her, all from the same photoshoot that I'd done for her two years ago.
I took them to FedEx Kinkos and had them blown up and matted.
I met her sister and father at Woofer's and Tweeters and gave the pictures to them.
I saw tears in his eyes.
He said to me: "This is the most profound picture of Shawna, and I'd never seen it before her..." he couldn't finish his sentance.
Before her death, is what he meant to say.
The picture I'm talking about is "Shawna Nicole" in my portfolio.
And her father was right.
It is, by far, the most profound picture I've ever taken.
And it was on a whim.

Everything she and I did was on a whim.
Nothing was ever planned.
Not until she and I planned to go get tattoos when she came of age.
Not until she and I planned to do her senior pictures the following weekend because the man that did her pictures freaked her out.

She was my muse.
Three weeks and one day.
Everything that I once knew to be real was completely shattered.