On your old apartment front step, as twilight ashes into darkness, she light headedly, dizzily, drunkenly, reminisces about you with hazy cigarette puffs and her favourite photo of you.
But there’s a photo of you she can’t burn and forget; where she watched you lay in some undignified box, dressed like Cinderella. It’s a contrast to the melancholic voices of organ pipes and sobs.
I guess this is what we’re supposed to call ‘the end’; an unexpected yet expected human truth.
She lights her favourite photo of you in your red ball gown, behind her glazed drunk eyes and abrupt laughter, fooling herself; because by then she’s reached her threshold of pain—she’s surpassed numbness.
But she will always deny that you’re not here.
You’re. Not. Here.
She has to sound out the words to remind herself that ‘not’ will always be “used to express the negative of other words”, the negative of alive.
Dead.
Just like that, with one swift desperate movement; weapon in your hand.
She’ll never really understand why you robbed yourself, because you robbed everyone around you too.
You’ll always be someone’s child, someone’s sibling, someone’s friend; but more than that you’ll be someone’s smile, someone’s reason to live, someone’s comfort.
You’re worth more than you think.
She didn’t even get to tell you…
But in front of her lays your weapon, its steeliness is cold in her hand. She doesn’t know why she kept it.
Yet when she glints your weapon to her face, not even the faintest reflection emerges.
In her mind she’s already gone, her perceptions too distorted. She’s stationary in the background world around her, in her red ball gown.
Remember how she’d smile at us all reassuringly? Did you fall for it too?
Now all that’s left are ticking clocks in silent rooms reminding us how finite a life really is.
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