I recall the last conversation I had with Julia one sunny teatime afternoon in her parents garden. I was doing my best to make her aware of my increasing paranoia. "I see peering faces more and more now in my peripheral vision, faces in a tree stump, in a bathroom linen hanging from a doorknob, the fenced-in neighbors dog came roaring at me in sidewalk intervals, I nearly collapsed from fright and exhaustion",
We used to kill time together.
Julia hung herself in her parents garden two weeks ago.
The love I had for Julia was significant upon interpersonal passages, leading in through backyard pathways onto slumbering streets in residential summer. We suffered together from lack of planning. Personal awareness lingered upon the pensive threshold of gradual depression and self-awareness. Her parents took her death much harder than I did. This made perfect sense to me, not the first time I lost my lover to suicide. Previously, I felt nothing, numbness descending, spiraling downward from transient cloud formations, where in darkened Winter, icicles aligned the kitchen window. I sat in the silent furnished living room staring vacantly at patterned wallpaper amid a monotonous ticking grandfather clock.
Her parents and I were able to maintain a forced yet casual understanding of the situation. I frequent their household twice a week, on Sunday after Catholic mass, then on Tuesday evenings at 7 P.M. sharp we share dinner. We do not speak of Julia, perhaps it is still too freshly engraved upon stale rising curtains of temped morning. Bedroom windows speak excruciating volumes of god, Jesus, and loss.
I knew Julia since the third grade when she (an only child) and her parents moved into my school district. A small suburban town about thirty miles south of the metropolitan outskirts. I have reached the point in my life where nothing touches my subdued consciousness, pain is the only reality that bears truth. A solitary moon appears to me every night among a trivial congregation of bright fluorescent stars, (some of them belonging to constellations).
I remember her soft voice, her aromatic perfume, her pale moist face slick and prevalent. Lip-stick smiles and mascara shaded countenances. Her stenciled portrait perished upon a dull white canvas, sad melancholy innuendos burn in noon- lit pools upon maroon carpeting. Crimson flames burn jaded categories and phrases we shared. Random topics of art and moonbeams, a luxury that ceased Julia. Her bedroom door remains open upon arrival. A steady breeze blows in through her screen windows. She is gone forever now, nothing can bring her back.
Julia you always admired Sylvia Plath, you told me you believed dying is the greatest art of all, I just can't seem to believe that.
One thing I do believe Julia is that you were
seven hundred and seventy seven times lovelier than anything I've ever seen.
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