✒️❤️✒️
A romantic looking ornament frame around a black and white picture, because everything looks better in black and white, and she’d smile on it which she rarely ever did for a camera. That’s what Lina has pictured the cards for her funeral to look like ever since she was 20. They look nothing like it. Holding one of them right now makes me wonder whether she’s ever told anyone but me what she pictured them. Maybe the others didn’t know, or they didn’t have a black and white picture of her, or none at all on which she was smiling. She’d hate it. Especially the colours: aggressively saturated and true to life, which makes no sense, she’d say, for someone who’s dead.
There’s her mother. She is giving me daggers from across the room. I think she knows that I should be the one in the first row, while she should have to sit here, hidden in a corner, like a loose acquaintance Lina didn’t really know. I bet she’s only jealous. Envious of how well I knew her daughter, whereas she had no clue who Lina really was. Just like everyone else who is sitting here, crying.
Do they know she got up at five every day, even when she didn’t have to? Or that every morning she burnt her tongue on her first sip of coffee, because she’d drink it faster than the milk could cool it down? Then she would curse to herself, and try to carry the cup onto the patio, but before she’d reach it, she would have clumsily finished it while walking. That’s when she’d return into the kitchen, shaking her head about her own impatience and the ways it only complicated her life. They know nothing about this, I’m sure. Neither do they know which roads she took home every day. Dark, untraveled ones, on which the old asphalt is barely still hanging on and she’d only take them, because she hated meeting anyone.
They know none of this. They don’t know anything at all.
Why would they buy white roses for her coffin? Or any flowers at all? She’d be furious and rightly so, because it only proves how little they knew her. The white lilies I bought her two weeks ago she only threw against the wall - scattered petals everywhere - and if I were brave enough, I’d sneak out from my corner now, walk up to her coffin and do the same with the roses, knowing that this is what she would have wanted.
Her brother barely looks at me. He is giving a speech up there. Why would he be, I wonder? They didn’t even like each other, and when he rang her late at night, she wouldn’t even take his calls. What would he have to say about her death, when he hardly acknowledged her in life? He is making it sound like she was a nice person who’d cry whenever dog food commercials came on. What is he thinking? She wasn’t nice at all. Anyone can be. She was Lina: screwed up and dark, even violent at times – the crusted scars on my right forearm prove it. A natural disaster, that’s what Lina was and in awe of the chaos she caused. I don’t know about the others, but that’s what I’ve always admired her for.
Will I make it through today, I wonder, without snapping at anyone? This terribly fancy dressed, chain-smoking lady two rows up front… Earlier out in the yard, she was the first person I nearly lost it with, but she will certainly not be the last. She was pretending to cry, although tears weren’t coming. What’s wrong with people? Don’t they understand nonverbal signals anymore? I was avoiding eye contact, because I really didn’t want to talk to her, but she forced me into it nevertheless.
“Sad what a troubled young woman she was, isn’t it? One of the good ones for sure, but they are always the most troubled. She would have deserved so much more!”
Can you please just shut up? Don’t pretend you know what Lina deserved or wanted! What Lina wished for is exactly what she got! And troubled? She wasn’t that at all! This is only what they say about people who they don’t understand.
“How did you know her?” They keep asking, but I cannot tell them and if I did, either way they wouldn’t understand. They would only judge us, me and her, for what we had, in the same way they keep judging her at her own funeral because of the way she came to death. Don’t worry, Lina, I’m not like them. Who would I be to judge you? You know me, that’s not what I do. I guess that’s why you trusted me in the first place
What is her father doing up there, bent over her dead body? It’s outrageous that he is even here. Back off her, old man! How dare you ruin her make-up with your crocodile tears? She still looks so beautiful. It must have taken them ages to restore her battered body, stitch up the wounds on her throat, and rearrange her broken ribs, so her chest wouldn’t look deformed.
Did her parents even see her before they stitched her up? I guess they did. Someone must have identified her, or maybe they only showed them her face, bruised and split up, but she was still recognizable. At least to me she was.
Why do the people right behind me have to whisper all the time? They are ruining the last time I’ll ever get to look at her and what they are talking about isn’t even relevant.
“I only hope she wasn’t scared in the weeks before she died. When was she taken, again?”
Taken sounds like she was an object: something heart- and soulless without a will that couldn’t fight off thieves. Lina wasn’t taken, she wasn’t stolen - she went. She decided to go somewhere she knew she mightn’t ever return from, and she enjoyed it, inspired by darkness and danger.
She was so talented. A master on the paintbrush and always in search of inspiration. I’d like to think I was her muse, if only for a little while. The last picture she painted was her most gruesome and at the same time her best one. Don’t worry, Lina, I will cherish it forever. Till the end of days, it will grace the entrance to my hall. You left it with me, because you knew I would appreciate every brushstroke, every dot, every line in it and even the spots in which your fingernails scraped off the colour in their panic.
You never named it, but when I first saw it, I knew what I would call it. Co-ordinated chaos. Full of feelings – messy – even though its brushstrokes are perfectly ordered. At heart, that is exactly what you were: chaos with an inner order, and – who knows – once I die, your last painting will make you immortal for it and me as well, because you gave birth to it in my decaying woodshed briefly before giving your life.
Should I show it to your family? Probably not, or they realize who I am. They don’t deserve it either way. Not your brother who is wiping his eyes right now, even though he isn’t crying. Not your father who is pretending to join you in your coffin, and not your mother who keeps looking at me weirdly, because she cannot figure out why I am here. They didn’t deserve you, Lina, and they don’t deserve the painting you put your heart and soul into.
“The poor family!” The chatterboxes behind me disturb the silence. “How long did it take the police to find her body, again? A few months, was it?”
It took them exactly 189 days, you cunt! 180 it took them to find a trace of her at all. A strain of hair in the woods where she used to go running. She looked so concentrated whenever she did. As if there was the world on her mind and she was trying to breathe it away, in and out. If I told them any of this, I wonder, would it finally seal their lips? Maybe I should try and if I did, I would possibly be able to feel my fingers again. If my cramping fist won’t loosen up anytime soon it will fall asleep and I will end up hitting the confessional in order to feel something again.
Just like my hand right now, you must have felt, Lina: numb and heavy during the last months of your life. You didn't want to be here anymore and only ever got into my jeep, so I could take you away. Unlike everyone else in this room, I know the truth. Of course I do, I've watched you long enough.
For months I have seen your despair from the darkest corners of the streets. I have recognized the longing in your paintings whenever I peeked into you window, felt the boredom behind every smile whenever I followed you on your nights out, and read the cryptic suicidal thoughts in your diary, whenever you were asleep.
You wanted to leave because they demanded an orderly life from you.
"I'd rather die," you told your journal, because you couldn't feel alive without chaos.
I hope someday the sobbing hypocrites in this church will understand that it was them what killed you - by trying to take away the mess that living was to you.
I slit your throat, my dear, but I didn't kill you, love. I couldn’t have. Because I loved you, Lina: from afar and without expecting that you’d ever love me back. In fact, my love for you was unconditional enough to end your suffering when I saw it. I did it out of mercy and that I had to do it, is only because of them: the people who surrounded, but never even saw you.