From Her, With Love

She was the kind of woman people wrote stories about, and I think she lived right around the corner from me. I never knew her name, but her coffee order was ingrained in my heart. “Medium iced coffee, decaf. Almond milk, with two pumps of toffee nut.” I heard her say it at the same time every day, despite the barista already having it on the counter and her crude likeness scribbled across thirteen sticky notes sitting beneath the register. She was made to be a muse, every bit of her romanticized by desperate and desolate “artists” searching for meaning, who pinned every whim and desire on a face they’d never see again, that it might live on far away from their self-destructive tendencies. She’d known it, too. In the end, it was the death of her.

I won’t talk about her hair, or her eyes, or the chocolate brown lipstick she wore. The day she threw herself in front of that truck was the day she abandoned her beauty. Not in sight (for even as she lay there dying, she was a crumpled moth yearning for the warm glow of a lantern), but in mind.

The notebook was left behind. She had wanted someone to find it, to know her, to truly love her. It was nearly filled with poems, lists of daily chores, things that reminded her of other things, and questions to ask other people so that they never went through life feeling as she did. There were no names, but there were people, places, books, movies, all of which she loved. It was a record of the inside of her brain, a map of her heart. This was what she wanted to be remembered, and when I slipped that little black book into my jacket just before the paramedics arrived, her plan came to fruition.

This is not to say that she was completely unknown to anyone on earth, but there is a way to struggle that is rejected by even those closest to you. A successful person may not feel inclined, nor have the energy to undermine their own stature in the eyes of others. To turn exposing weakness into an uphill battle would, quite frankly, discourage anyone. They all were satisfied with what they felt they knew, and filled in the gaps as they went. Whether love or hate was proclaimed, it was empty, for the person in their mind’s eye existed solely there.

I came to know her not long after her passing. She was no angel, simply a weary soul trying to find love in even the littlest things of life. The harder she looked, the more afraid she became that there wasn’t truly anything for her out there. Her plants died no matter how hard she tried to take care of them, and she wrote often about the acidity of pineapple. Her shopping lists grew thin, and she did not cry the last time she read her favorite book. She hated her mother, and could not seem to apologize enough to her sister. The delicate structure of dahlias whispered in her ear that there was, in fact, a God.

In the back pocket of the book, there was a smudged slip of paper with an address. I took a drive to it one day, and found myself upstate at a dilapidated home. Stepping through, I didn’t find much to be spoken for, except the $20,000 cash in an old soup can near the back of a cupboard. I spoke to the neighbor, Sheryl, about it who recalled a serious, well-dressed young lady that came poking around the house maybe once a year. I asked her if she knew anything more, and she only said that she heard there had been a fire there long ago and the neighborhood kids used to regularly play inside.

Driving home that night, I was at a bit of a loss. It took me about a week or so to decide to type up her notebook and have it published for the world to experience, and donate the rest to a suicide prevention organization, save perhaps a month’s rent. Later, at our shared cafe where we both spent too much time, I approached the management to discuss a few possibilities. We screwed a small plaque into her favorite table, not with her scribbled likeness (as the barista insisted on), nor with her name (she only paid with cash), but with the date she decided against it all, and they graciously kept a copy of her notebook there as reading material.

Sitting there, reading her words once more, enjoying a decaf medium iced coffee with almond milk and two pumps of toffee nut in the dead of winter, it’s not hard to become her, if even only for a moment. Even as I leave this place, and bring my scarf up to my nose, she’s with me now, and she will stay with me in the questions I ask others, the gaps I let others bridge themselves, and the bite of a golden pineapple.