Who is this terribly fancy dressed, chain-smoking lady two rows up front? Out in the yard, she was the first person I nearly lost it with today, 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 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 wanted! What Lina wished for was 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. Decided to go somewhere she knew she mightn’t ever return from, and she enjoyed it, inspired by darkness and danger. I cannot tell them, though, and if I did they wouldn’t believe me. They couldn’t, because they didn’t know her any bit at all.
© Sima B. Moussavian 2022-07-15