Though I had been six years old and a little immature, I, Brian Haner still remembered the day I met Hazel Murphy with extreme clarity.

I had been woken up by my mother on that sunny Thursday morning and had somehow managed to spill Fruit Loops all over the floor whilst attempting to pour them into my own bowl. I’d been a slightly klutzy child, always dropping and breaking things that I was holding, and my parents barely trusted me with a glass of orange juice, let alone a bowl of cereal. My brother had always convinced me that one day they were going to put bubble wrap up all over the house so that if I dropped something it wouldn’t break, and for three months, I’d woken up screaming after having nightmares about being eaten by a colony of bubble wrap. But back to the moment I met Hazel.

We’d been painting, or rather, sticking our palms in brightly coloured paints and spreading them all over the page in the hope that we’d make something our parents could pin up on the refrigerator for a few weeks and then throw in the garbage when we were entertained with something else. I believe I was trying to paint a bowl of fruit, when really it was splodges of colours all over the page, complete with a blue smiley face that was meant to be a bowl. Hazel and I had reached for the pot of purple paint at the same time, and our hands had touched for the very first time. I swear I’d been electrocuted the way my hand shot away from the pot and I proceeded to hide behind my small wooden easel, out of her way.

It was then that she’d tapped me on my shoulder and held out the purple paint pot for me to use.

“My names Hazel and my favourite colour is purple” she’d announced, swaying from side to side with her hands behind her back while I smeared the page with a large amount of purple paint, probably managing to get some on my shirt in the process.
“My name’s Brian Haner and my favourite colour is purple too” I’d replied and from that day on, we had never been able to be parted.

Throughout high school however, I’d spent my time watching her from afar, never quite being able to tell her how I really felt about her. And one day, while I was sat watching the stars, she’d called me and told me that a guy had asked her out on a date, her first proper date. That man’s name was Matthew Sanders and just eight years later, they were standing side by side at their wedding, saying their vows and promising to love each other come what may. I stood on the other side of Matt as his best man, and a small tear had trickled out of my eye just watching the two of them recite the vows.

They’d looked so happy in each other’s company that I knew my time of dreaming and hoping was up. The night she’d told me about how happy Matt made her, I’d known that I was in love with her.
It was a strange kind of love, the one that you can’t really describe to someone, it’s just too difficult. I tried, I really tried. But it was never any good- I couldn’t get Hazel out of my mind.
Hazel and Matt broke up for a while, and for a long time I tried to convince myself that this was my moment to jump right in and tell her how I’d been feeling for so long, to let her know that I wanted my heart to belong to her.
When we’d both been eight years old, we’d played house in the wooden treehouse at the bottom of her backyard, where she would be the Mom and I would be the Dad.

I’d brave the precarious rope ladder to climb up to our little house where she’d be cooking dinner with grass from the ground and pebbles from the beach. I’d tell her how my day working at the hamburger factory was (yes, eight year old's could be really creative when they wanted to be) and she’d tell me that our baby had been crying all day and that she was tired. It was always the same rehearsed dialogue every single time we played house, but it would always ring true in my ears. And I’d get up from my seat and wrap my arms around her little body, and press a sweet kiss to her cheek, just like my Dad did to my Mom when he came home from work.

This was after the times I’d worked out that girl’s didn’t have cooties, and were actually pretty and sweet and kind. At least, I thought Hazel was at the time. And I still do, though she won’t ever know until someone finds this and reads it.

There was one moment where I let my guard down. Let my emotions get the better of me if only to prove that she held my heart in the palm of her hand, whether she knew it or not. When Hazel was sixteen, during her break with Matt, she’d come into school with a black eye and a bruise on her hip. After I’d questioned her about it, she’d said she’d fallen down the stairs. I later found out from one of the cheerleaders that she was now in a relationship with the captain of the football team, a douchebag who wasted no time in making my life a misery.

While Matt slipped into depression now that Hazel had found someone else, I found more and more marks staining her once perfect skin. Over the summer months, she wore sweaters and long shirts to school, and she wouldn’t let me come to her house anymore, even when I just wanted to talk to her and find out what was going on. And it wasn’t until I got a cold call late one night that I snuck out of my house and into hers to find her sobbing on the floor, only in her underwear and covered in bruises and cuts.

He’d been beating her. So that night, I went with my father’s crossbow and showed him just what happened when you fucked with Brian Haner’s best friend.

At their wedding reception, I’d watched Hazel dancing with Matt on the dancefloor, their arms wrapped around each other. It wasn’t the strange surge of jealously that ripped through me that encouraged me to do what I did next, but it was a horrible revealation that struck me as I sipped at my drink and felt a depression begin to wash over me. Hazel was everything I wanted to have. But she wanted someone to love her and shower her with attention the way only a boy who was completely in love with her could. True love. The kind of love she’d never had. And that love could only work if she felt exactly the same way about the other person.

I suddenly had no purpose now that I was no longer chasing after my best friend. She was married, taken away by another person who loved her just as much as I did, if not more.
So one night, a few months after the wedding, I joined the Army.

I don’t regret my decision, not to this day, but I still remember the way she cried just before I was flown out to Afghanistan for my first position. She and Matt came to see me off at the airport, and she’d pulled me into a tight hug, tears dripping off of her heart shaped face.
“I love you” she’d whispered to me, pressing a sweet kiss to my cheek and staring up at me. She had no idea that those words meant so much more to me than she knew, but I’d just nodded and hugged her back, trying my hardest not to cry too. She’d pressed something into my hand that day, and it wasn’t until I’d boarded the plane and was sat 50,000 feet off of the ground that I uncurled my palm to see what was inside.

A simple silver chain with a cross on it, the necklace I had bought her for her sixteenth birthday. There was a diamond on the front, and as the plane descended, I’d draped it around my neck and kissed it for good luck.
Three years later, and I was out on the front line, waiting for the enemy to strike. Five of us were knelt there, guns trained, eyes squinted and the tension on our shoulders weighing us down like tonnes of bricks were strapped to our skin. Out of my neck, I’d picked up that cross like I always did and pressed a kiss to the diamond, imagining that I was kissing the woman I’d lost back home.

The roar had sounded and we’d run, exactly what we had been ordered to do. In a haze of gunfire, I’d fallen to the floor to try and see myself in the smoke, when suddenly something had pierced through my heart like a spike being driven into my chest. I’d screamed and dropped the gun, trying to get through the pain, but it was useless.
“MAN DOWN! MAN DOWN!” someone roared from the other side of the battlefield and though others were swarming around, trying to save me, it was no use. There was going to be no saving Brian Haner today. Now was my time to leave the earth.

The next week Matt and Hazel and their two young children had been visited by an Army officer to tell them that Lieutenant Brian Haner had been KIA. Killed In Action.

And I still remember as the brightness began to fade and the darkness began to drown me steadily in its depths, that I’d scrambled the necklace out of my shirt and held it in my fist tightly, my eyes flickering closed as I said my last words, leaving the world forever. In my mind I saw flashing images, and all the time I saw the two of us playing house together, as innocent as children could be. How different childhood dreams could become when they were faced with the reality of growing up. My other hand clutching the hand of one of my fellow officers, and a man I’d grown to love over the time spent here, I whispered in final defeat,

“I love you, Hazel Murphy”