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 colors: 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 that 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, clumsily she would have finished it. That’s when she’d return to 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 was barely 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 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? 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 even 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. They don’t know her, though. They don’t know anything at all.
© Sima B. Moussavian 2022-07-15