she
(a eulogy for anne)

I cannot keep her,
so I will sell her to you at a bargain. But one
small thing, a mere precautionary note:
. She's very lovely.

Toward the end of things, I declined to answer the phone and took to cleaning. I scrubbed the bathroom sink and toilet, emptied closets and bedroom drawers, took antiseptic to the already-bleached signs of an addiction past. In this flurry of empty industrialism I thought to be strong, to be practical. But standing amongst the stones I know I haven't got a clue. Do we envy her that she lived? Be angry that she lived and died?

It cannot be meaningless. Surely towards the end she reached contentment, peace, a happiness of sorts, discovered the truth which she'd pursued with such single-minded intent. Yes, I like to think she found her love and held it tight, clutched it to the skin snaking whitely 'round her corporeal rudeness, dreamed it, breathed and ate of it until the nothingness she sought was hers to own. I tell myself the madness was preordained, a gift, even. I tell myself that a lessening of the madness would have killed her anyway.

There's no one's lived so fast and hard, so foolish and so recklessly. A living spirit with a beating heart, she breathed as no one breathed, for she was my child. Now nothing more than waste, her memory grows elusive, is made icier still by the photographs so lovingly laid atop her coffin. For these glossy pictures cannot help but betray the girl who lived, with a smile so brilliant and unapologetic, but a flicker and flash, a wave goodbye.