Hear the Wind Sing

26

I’ll tell you about the third girl I slept with. It’s really difficult to talk about dead people, but it’s even harder to talk about dead young women. It’s because from the time they die, they’ll be young forever.

On the other hand, for us, the survivors, every year, every month, every day, we get older. Sometimes, I feel like I can feel myself aging from one hour to the next. It’s a terrible thing, but that’s reality.

* * *

She wasn’t what anyone would call a beautiful girl. However, saying ‘she wasn’t a beauty’ probably isn’t a fair way to put it. ‘She wasn’t as beautiful as she could have been’ seems like an accurate way to describe it, I think.

I have only one picture of her. The date is written on the back, August 1963. The year Kennedy was shot in the head. She’s sitting on a seawall, a beach seemingly near some summer resort, smiling slightly uncomfortably. She’s wearing a short, Jean Seburgstyle hairdo (no matter what anybody says, it reminds me of Auschwitz), wearing a long-edged gingham one-piece dress. She looks clumsy, beautiful. It’s a beauty that could pierce the most delicate regions of the heart of the viewer.

Her thin lips pressed together, her tiny, upturned nose looking like a dainty insect’s antenna, her bangs looking as if she’d cut them herself, dangling carelessly across her wide forehead, her slightly bulging cheeks, upon which tiny pockmarks, remnants of pimples can be seen.

When she was fourteen years old, that was the time in her twenty-one-year lifetime when she was the happiest. And then she disappeared so suddenly, is all I can think. For what purpose, what reason such a thing could be possible, I have no idea. Nobody does.

* * *

She said once, seriously (I’m not joking), “I entered college to have a heavenly revelation.”

This was before four a.m., both of us naked in bed. I asked her what kind of heavenly revelation she was expecting.

“How should I know?” she said, but added a moment later, “Maybe something like angels’ feathers falling from the sky.”

I tried to imagine the spectacle of angels’ feathers falling onto the university’s courtyard, and from afar it looked much like tissue paper.

* * *

Nobody knows why she killed herself. I have a suspicion that maybe she herself may not have known.