I sit outside, everything is so dark. Clouds move across the sun and everything feels grey and lonely. I hear a crash, and thinking it’s the sound of the gate, I look up from my hands, staring ahead of me. All I’m greeted with in my view are black clouds rolling up fast over the southern horizon. Lightening flickers across the sky with ease, cutting through the air like a knife, leaving a cracked white trail in the forlorn sky. As soon as it appears, it vanishes, and I count, like you used to, to see how many miles away the lightening strike was. One…Two…Thr—Crash! I think its three miles, but I’m not exactly sure. I figure you would know, and that I’d tell you once you had arrived.

I stay up fairly late, it’s at least past ten PM by now and I feel drowsy, but I’m going to wait for you as long as it takes for you to make it from your house all the way to me sitting on this front porch. I am patient, I can wait. I can wait for you.

I’m still on the porch and my watch says its past midnight already. You were supposed to be here at quarter till eleven, and yet I still wait for you outside in the bitter cold, hoping you are all right. I shiver from the cold and imagine your arms around me to keep me warm.

I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing that happened, I woke up to see that the police were there in front of the house talking to my parents, both of which eyes glistened with tears. The tears in my mother’s eyes betrayed her and they fell in swift cascades of salty water down her cheeks. I wondered why they were crying, but then I saw paramedics lifting a girl up from the ground and placing her on a stretcher. Her eyes were a rich shade of blue and were left open and non-blinking. Her fingers and small nose showed signs of terrible frostbite. With that alone, I knew she was dead. Her face reminded me of myself in some way. As soon as I took another glimpse at her; I knew it was me and that I was dead. But how come I was still here? The rolling clouds above the yard finally broke with on last crack of thunder and rain pelted down.

I stood in the rain for the rest of the morning, not even wet or at least a little damp. I knew why I had stayed behind; my soul was still waiting for you. It waited to be the first to great you as you opened the white picket fence.

So when I saw you today, after so many years of standing here, standing on this lonely porch watching sunsets, sunrises, the moon and its stars, as well as the storms that make the skies dark and gloomy, like the day I died. I suddenly feel lighter and a feeling of belonging has returned. As I leave you now and your face is clouding with tears, and saying how sorry you were for that night, I laugh like I always do. I remind you that I told you long ago, over the phone, the day before my dying day. I would wait for you upon my porch. You said not to, but I insisted, for I said I was a very patient and could wait through anything.

You nod, but I know you don’t believe me one bit. My time is getting nearer and I feel my soul starting to fade, completing its last wish in this life time. You call out to me to wait for you in heaven. I smile brightly and touch my hand to your face one last time, feeling myself lifting up toward the top most reaches of the sky, and I utter my last words to you before I’m gone, “I’ll be waiting, for you to come through that white picket fence, where I’ll welcome you with a song all the other angels will turn red in envy. I’ll wait for you.”