Set the scene: this is day two of a four-month study abroad experience in Buenos Aires. It is a hot Argentine summer, which is to say, the temperature is in the mid-nineties on the first day of March. All of you have been here for roughly twenty-four hours, and none of you feel fully adjusted to the sudden heat after below-freezing temperatures.

You go to a big university back home. Big enough that, despite the fact that half the people in this program are from your school, you know not a single face. You are playing name games in your head, matching faces with stories you hear out loud, with pictures next to names in group chats. The room is filled with five long tables, and as you are seated second-closest to the front, you see in front of you a set of quintuplets. They aren’t actually related, but they could be, with their brown hair, worn-out jeans, baseball caps, small talk, and arms casually resting over the backs of their chairs, all grinning with ease the way certain twenty-something-year-old guys tend to do. You know the type: business majors.

Charlie is one of them. You learn this because he thinks his host family might live near yours. His will be the first name you learn in Buenos Aires, and his name and the city will become, in time, permanently associated.

The key phrase for nightclubs is “Charlie’s birthday.” Charlie turns twenty-one four days into the program, and everyone quickly discovers how easy it is to get into clubs when someone is celebrating something important. Now every weekend is Charlie’s birthday.

You spend your time picking up on the hip-swaying style of regatón and analyzing the group of people you are beginning to consider friends. You particularly like watching how the men dance. The Latinos dance fluidly, the Europeans quietly watch, but the American men proudly fail in the middle of this big group of foreigners, and Charlie is dead center, drunk on tequila and life abroad.

Charlie becomes social at night. During the day, he is more reserved, more studious, often sits in a chair in the corner of a room with headphones in, typing, typing, typing something for some class. He joins conversations when they are academic, or when someone says something wrong, and he wants to politely correct them. But at night, Charlie sways and spins and leads with his shoulders; he is carefree and happy and everyone can’t help but smile watching him. Sometimes, Charlie grabs your hand, spinning you. Other times, when he’s significantly less sober, he grabs your hand and spins himself. He does this to all the girls and the guys who will let him.

He’s a terrible dancer, and he knows it, and somehow, he doesn’t care. You want to be like this, you want to tell him you admire this, but it seems sappy to say. Across the room, a wallflower, you only watch and keep your thoughts to yourself.

Charlie recommends books to you. It is a crowded city bus late at night, and you are traveling with a big group of friends to go out drinking and dancing because this is what you do when you are young and abroad and feeling careless and invincible. The seats are full, and you both sway by the door, constantly readjusting where you stand to let people out, to let people in, to let people pass by. Your voices grow to overpower the sounds of rapid Spanish conversation, of honking horns and traffic, of the never-ending stream of footsteps, exiting and entering.

He is the first person you’ve ever met your age who loves analyzing Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, and he recommends the Argentine writer Borges and other writers that you will later forget the names of. In this moment, it doesn’t matter if you remember them all. You remind yourself to have this conversation again, to ask him before you go home to recommend more. You are in love not with him, but with the way he presents himself and takes on the world. It is nothing romantic, but it is a powerful connection.

On Tuesdays, you drink mate, an Argentine drink, with your advisor and catch up with the other Americans. More often than not, you listen to conversations between your advisor and Charlie, who has so many questions about running a small business of his own someday.

“Maybe I could own a ski shop,” he muses once, and you can really envision it, Charlie returning back to his hometown in Wyoming and owning a ski shop and disappearing into this adventurous life he’s created for himself. Charlie loves mountains and hiking and somehow, everyone agrees that they could see him in this reality.

This is why it’s not so surprising that on the final mate Tuesday, Charlie discusses traveling to Chile after everyone else goes back home. “While I’m in South America,” he says, “I figure I should see it all. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” This logic has always seemed strange to you, as if a person might not have another twenty or forty or sixty years left to explore. But you wish him luck all the same. “Find more about Isabel Allende,” you say, referencing the Chilean writer you both love, and he swears he’ll try to learn as much Chilean history as he can. And you smile to yourself, that the two of you can share these passions.

On the last night in the city, everyone is hugging everyone and you are specifically considering how best to say goodbye to your close Colombian friends when Charlie comes over to hug you. There is a huddle of people from your university, hugging and laughing, and you can’t help but laugh, too, at the irony that while you might never see some of the people in this program again, you will almost definitely see the people from your own university.

“I’ll see you in two months,” you laugh to Charlie, and he says, “alright, alright,” and then, to everyone from your school, he promises that he will have a party at his house, that you are all invited, and you will all get to know one another in your lives outside of this city.

There are tears in your eyes, but not because of this speech; you are not focused on Charlie’s little speech. You are thinking about how to say goodbye to all your other friends from other continents. You are trying to figure out how many years it might be before reuniting with your friends again. The thought of not seeing some of these people for years seems unbearable.

You are back at your university, on the street with friends who’ve never been to South America, about to buy frozen yogurt, when you run into him. Not Charlie. A different business major. He is shorter and you remember him less but you hug him all the same, comment on how weird it is to see people from abroad, here, at home. You are talking and he is listening and finally, he interjects,

“Did you hear what happened to Charlie?”

You did not. Your relationship with Charlie had only ever been confined to moments shared in Argentina.

“Charlie…” he is choking on the words and you don’t know what to expect, exactly, but it is not this. “Charlie passed away.”

You have questions. You have so many questions. You want to know what exactly happened, you want to know when it happened, you want to figure out how to breathe again and how to make your stomach feel like it won’t regurgitate everything you’ve eaten today.

The answers are, in the proper order: Unexpected, unexplained seizures, that prevented him from getting to Chile a month ago. A few days ago, at his home in Wyoming, but his family wasn’t ready to announce it until yesterday. Open your mouth and let your lungs expand and think about something else for a moment. Don’t buy frozen yogurt after all.

You and your friends walk to the park, on your request, because you cannot begin to stomach anything at this moment and you cannot bear to sit alone in your room. The group of you sit in the grass, all of them chatting with their frozen yogurt, and occasionally one will glance over at you and ask if you are okay and you will be reminded that the world does, in fact, exist, that time is not slowing down or stopped, that the grass under your feet and legs is real and the people around you are moving and laughing and living, and that Charlie simply isn’t, and there isn’t any fully comprehendible reason.

After an hour, you go home. And you sit in your room. And you sob. And you sob. And you sob. And eventually, you just decide to put yourself to bed.

The party does happen at Charlie’s house, in a way. Everyone who can make it from your university has come together for the first time in a month, over the summer in the middle of July heat, weather not unlike that heat back in March back across the world, to celebrate Charlie’s life. It is happy and it is sad. You all reminisce and look at pictures. His roommate thanks everyone for coming, hands out packets of sunflower seeds that say “in memory of,” because sunflowers were his favorite flower, and you are reminded how much of Charlie you never got to know. And you look at all the faces at the party that weren’t from study abroad, all the people that Charlie knew long before you, and you wonder who Charlie was on this campus before you met him, and who he might have become had you continued to know him.

You take the seeds home and you leave them on your desk. You don’t know how to plant sunflowers, you’ve never had a green thumb, and you don’t want to do it wrong and not honor Charlie in the right way. Because it feels like you have done too much wrong already, and if you could go back to the past, you would thank him for all the times he walked you home, you would tell him how many times you silently appreciated his dedication to knowledge and honesty, and you would go back to that last night in Argentina and hug him harder than you’ve ever hugged anyone else.

But you can’t. And the dreams wake you up in the morning, dreams where he appears as a minor character as if to say, “I’m still here, in the background of your life, as I’ve been since March.” And the memories haunt you, all the forgotten names of books and authors, all the conversations you had with him, and yet all you can remember is one little crowded conversation on a city bus. And you don’t plant the sunflowers because in planting them, you have to admit that Charlie isn’t just back in South America exploring for an extra-long time, and Charlie is not back in Wyoming getting a jump start on his ski shop. Charlie is gone.

It is September when you realize that you need to plant the sunflowers. Your eyes are glossing over them on your desk, as you often tend to do when you see there is an expiration date. An expiration date? On flowers? You’ve never had a green thumb. You don’t know flowers. But you realize that these flowers need to be planted and grow in warmth, and that Fall is quickly approaching, and after Fall comes November.

You look up how to plant sunflowers online. You get a plastic bag and a damp paper towel, place the seeds in both and leave them by the windowsill for forty-eight hours. After forty-eight hours, you discover there are sprouts beginning to grow. You have never had a green thumb, but you have grown something.

It is pouring when you need to plant them. You have no shovel and no gardening gloves, which you realize now is a terrible plan for trying to plant flowers. But you also know that sometimes birds drop sunflower seeds on the ground and they grow into beautiful sunflowers. So you, soaked from rain and with a dampened spirit, toss your little sprouts onto exposed dirt in the ground and hope for the best.

You imagine Charlie’s nonexistent ski shop in the mountains in Wyoming, rows and rows of sunflowers now emerging in the mental picture. You know, deep down, that you will not see Charlie again, not in this life. But you imagine it anyway. How someday, in the future, he will send you all postcards, everyone from the different countries reuniting in Wyoming. And you’ll hug him after so long. You’ll say-

I’m sorry I didn’t hug you hard enough in Buenos Aires. I’m sorry the sunflowers I planted for you didn’t grow. I’m sorry I never got the chance to know you better.

And then you’ll all go inside Charlie’s house by his ski shop in Wyoming, and drink mate and dance to regatón, like you did so many years ago, careless and young and invincible.

– Rebecca Sylvernale