Dee was my friend, my sister and my life's teacher almost took her life once again. On Monday, I watched her closely and observed. Her face was like so many other women, almost pretty, but kept from being so by one unbecoming feature: her smile, there was none. Her body neither provoked lust nor revulsion in a man. It was thin, not slender. Her jeans seemed to hang loosely from her almost non-existent hips. Her hair glistened from the sun and weighed heavy with oil on her shoulders; he had not washed it for many days. She just did not care. The slippery sliding of the water across her hands looked as though it felt cool to her under the steaming August sun; a tear of sweat slowly drips down her blank face. No wait! Was that a tear? Night was but a few precious hours away; birds told stories in the trees. The birds told only half the story, the rest to the deep archives of her mind, where tragedy and hope mingled into one bright memory. It had been a long summer with her and her negative spirit. .
The dewy evening was like a surreal play in my backyard. Children moved around her, washed their hands in the fountain, whispered their lives to one another, burst like giant soap bubbles into a sparkling of chaotic laughter, and then quietly were whisked away by the coming of the evening. It was all there, happening, evolving little stories she could not comprehend. It was she who was so different; she couldn't hear and her sight was slowly deteriorating into darkness. There was one time she could do both. Off all people, I could not relate. Slowly the children leave one by one; the night would be there soon.
She tried to kill herself twice before. Kill- an awful, over-reactive word. To kill or to be killed, which is worse? Her life spread out before her now like one endless checkerboard. Each square was like another challenge, and her moves were stalemated. Checkmate! And it was all over.