the loss of a voice

"Thom Mannarino died."
i hear the shaky voice of a fellow student say over the phone.
"I wanted you to hear it from me and not through the grapevine ..." she continues to speak words though only the first three have any meaning and they mean so much. she goes on to explain that he died in a fire in Henderson where his parents live. after almost a year i learn in this conversation where he has been. so many questions are answered in his death, but so many more arise from the loss.
i was praying so hard that he would come back into my life. i believed he would. i really did. i had his number but i just couldn't call, suddenly nervous after years of boldness in his classes. and by the time i was ready it was disconnected.
this "too little, too late" is too much to bear.
time strikes me as something wholly different now that he is gone. days are somehow shorter, hours less signifcant, minutes mere sounds as small and ignorable as sands roving the shoreline.
i can't understand it.
and i don't know how to explain my loss of him. it is incomparable and therefore seems dismissable. as if our age difference, his lack of relation to me, our teacher student status renders him expendable. like how losing an uncle or a friend is not as bad as losing a father or sibling. but sometimes it is.
and as i lay here in delaware living out of my trunk passing sunrises and sunsets asleep or working i am overcome by how much dimmer the world seems without him in it. i don't want him to be gone. every word i pen speaks of him, and his advice, criticism, and encouragment. and i find, even moreso now that he is gone, that he is bolder and more permanant than the ink that stains these pages. he will outlast every well-honed phrase, every story, every punctuation, every voice i find within myself.
he is the voice inside my head. and no words are ever born within me without the echo of his.