how to understand “if only he were here... An unspoken sentence every time we were happy”？ My point is not to make you feel uncomfortable or sorry for me, only to express that despite having almost nothing material or memorable left with which to conjure Daniel, I've felt the tie between us all my life. An invisible thread connects us just as certainly as day is bound to night. It's always been that way, even when I was small. If I were a presence in my parents' house, he was an absence. An unspoken sentence every time we were happy: if only he were here; every time I disappointed them: He wouldn't have done so; every time I started a new school year: Those would be his classmates, those big kids over there. The distant look I caught in their gazes sometimes when they thought they were alone.