No Title.

When I first ventured out into the world away from home, I had a friend who we will call Aria. Aria was a Princess from some obscure and distant Eastern European country that evoked images of vampires on the mountains, and werewolves in the woods. She had long black hair, her body as thin as a scythe, her eyes were pools of pure shiny blackness. I guess what I'm trying to tell you here is that she was intensely and darkly beautiful, in a distant and inaccesible way.

We had an odd relationship to start with. She would come to the door, say "hi", and once inside, she would sit on the floor in complete silence, and draw hundreds of sharp and jagged knives on pages she tore from her diary.

Then she would announce "I'm leaving", and leave she would.

Years passed, and as they did, Aria came more and more out of herself. She worked in a bar, hung out, and even told jokes. I was relieved. She had relationships with a couple of people I knew, and then she met Marcus. He was about as famous as you could be within his field, and everyone I knew thought he was the greatest. We lost touch when they both moved to Los Angeles together, and made a whole new life for themselves.

Aria was happy, and deeply in love.

But my good friend Marcus was secretly very sad. After a time, his secrecy frayed away, and there was no more pretense. He killed himself on my birthday.

My memories of him are like he was a thermos that someone had dropped and never confessed about. So together and tough on the outside, but inside he was all water and broken glass. As soon as I heard I thought of poor Aria, and remembered all those pages of her drawings I never threw away. And I imagined her when she found him, hanging dead from the rafters. And I wondered if all those years ago, she was looking into the future, silently asking me for a sharp and jagged knife, so she could cut him down.