She was Beautiful.

She took her own life, did you know that? They didn’t want anyone to know, so the answer always was, “a sudden loss.” Sudden. She was dying for years and no one noticed except me. I knew because she told me. Matter-of-a-factly one day she just looked me in the eye and told me that she was dying. At first I thought she had a disease or some kind of pre-teen ‘dying of a broken heart’ thing but it turns out she was serious. I realized that, after a point. I noticed from afar, (we were friends only in front of each other at the time) after she told me, all the pained looks she had on her face in between people. I guess no one else was looking.

“Why are you doing this?” I’d asked her once. School had just started for another year and we felt the breath of autumn on our backs, and she’d called to ask me if I wanted to touch its’ heart. I had no idea what she was saying until she translated that into, ‘want to go to the park?’

She turned to me, straggly pieces of hair stuck up in the wind. “I didn’t ask for this,” she whispered.

“Can’t you make it stop?” although I knew well enough that she couldn’t. I couldn’t either.

“I can’t stop it for either one of us.” She took a skip forward, her pale fingers dancing over the air and faced me, dead on. “I wish I could, you know that right?”

“I know. I’m not all stupid man/boy.”

“More like boy/man!” and she laughed, that laugh that haunts me because I can hear it now. I can tell.

So we kept going on like that. Moments of eloquence followed by a shallow struggle to pull out of the awkward moments we created. Or she did, I was always unnerved by the way she got straight to the point. No ambling.

She called herself, “less than ordinary.”

She prayed for fifteen years then noticed she didn’t think anyone was there.

She forced me to make promises, and I did the same to her.

She stared in the mirror and saw nothing.

I’m telling you the truth. It wasn’t a sudden death. It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t painless. She was my beautiful, my silent and I don’t know exactly when it happened. It must have been years ago. But to everyone else, it was two nights ago, at 2:47 in the morning and they all thought, “what a shame” when they saw her lying there. I’m ashamed.

-written march, 2006.