Disclaimer: The song If You Could Only See belongs to Cyndi Thomson, or so I'm thinking, and I don't own Chris or Gordie either. Although I wish I did..

You come home uncompleted

Down and defeated

Feeling all alone

Everyone laughed as Chris Chambers sat down in his desk after incorrectly answering the math equation on the board that I didn't even know the answer to. He kept his eyes cast down, but I could still see how defeated they looked. I was the only person in the room who was not smiling or laughing it up at Chris' expense.

I knew that every time he was laughed at, he broke down a little bit more.

You think your dreams are passing by you

And deep down inside you

You're running out of hope

Even though I felt like the lowest person on earth for never sticking up for that bruised and battered boy, I was still disgusted with how cruelly inhuman my apparent friends acted towards him. Nobody really knew him, with the exception of his best friend, a depressed, kind-eyed guy named Gordie Lachance, but still, everyone despised him. He came from a bad home on the wrong side of the tracks, and his father was a lowlife alcoholic who beat him. Not a week went by when Chris didn't come to school with bruises or a broken bone of some sort, souvenirs of the hell he went home to. But Chris never complained, and never asked for sympathy. And he definitely never received any from his peers. He was the punch line of every nasty joke they came up with, and he always had been. Their blind hatred for him grew when, despite all odds, he enrolled in the college courses instead of letting everyone tell him what he was and going into the shop courses designed for the retards no one cares about.

I could tell that Chris had had something in mind for his future. But the continual beatings he endured physically from his dad and emotionally from his classmates were robbing him of every dream he'd ever imagined.

If you could only see what I see

You'd see the man that you wish you could be

If you could only see what I see in you

I'd fallen for this good-for-nothing thief when I saw him smile for the first time. It was a haunted, been-there-done-that smile, and it made his eyes look sad. When I saw him smile though, I wanted to make his pain stop. I wanted to erase every fear, scar and tear. I wished he didn't have to have so many unanswered prayers and so many insatiable dreams.

You're my strength, the light that guides me

The angel beside me, the path that I walk

When I wake up, you're why I want to

The one I hold on to when I start to fall

He made me realize how perfect my life was when held next to his. I'd never really had to fight for anything like he did. Here was this boy in my math class who had grown up too fast but was too scared to be a man yet. He was sitting alone, trapped in his family's shadow while people laughed at him. Looking at him, loathing everyone who didn't see how special he was, I felt trapped in the shadow of my own foolish immaturity and weakness.

If only he knew that I admired him and wanted to know everything about him and be his escape from hell.

Wish I could make you believe in all you are

You don't have to be everything to everyone

Everybody's number one

Because baby you're everything to me

I would trade my life for his so that he could be happy. I hardly knew him, but I knew that he had this light around him too beautiful for anyone to mar or scratch like they had done to his hope. If I had been as strong as he was, I could have shunned the shackles of unforgiving prejudice that my peers had put around my ankles. But I wasn't and I'm still not.

If you could only see what I see

You'd see the man that you wish you could be

If you could only see what I see in you

I remember all those days in high school when I'd look across the room at him and pray to God to give me enough strength to walk over to him and tell him everything would be okay and that there were people on the sidelines that were rooting for him. But God never gave me enough courage to even smile at him.

I still hate myself for passing up the opportunity to get to know him and I still wonder what things would have been like if only I had. Chris Chambers is dead now, and I wish I had told him what I had seen in him back then.