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She kept pieces of people. In a box under her bed. She said she’d never had much luck keeping the whole person close. Relationships, based upon friendship, love or lust where all lost, the people she most craved a phone-call away, but too distant to reach. So she kept memories. Scraps of paper, visual motifs, and sound recordings, all hidden away, just beneath her heart when she slept. Little pieces to convince her self she was close to the past.
Those little scraps probably wouldn’t be recognised by the people her heart clung to the idea of. Second hand books which had been bought as gifts, years later totally forgotten, the buyer unaware they would sit by her bed for decades. Pressed flowers from beau’s of a few weeks, crumbled to dust like their memory in the mind of the one who plucked them. Old tickets, letters, four leafed clovers, foreign currency, programs, and cards, all tucked away. Never looked at, but kept near by, as a means of both mental torture and a necessity to living.
She kept the pieces of people she liked and disliked in equal measure, love and hate were unknown factors to her. So she kept the gifts from those that had loved her too much, next to those which had never appreciated her love.
There where other boxes under her bed, those, which held shoes, and bags, and darker secrets. Put the box of people was the least disturbed. With less and less people touching her life it was rarely added to. And it existed not to be regularly studied. But simply to exist. Knowledge of its contents was all that was needed. Once it was safely shut no one need know what was contained. As tightly looked and secreted as her heart.
The first time I saw her was as unreal and stereotyped as a movie still. All black glasses, black cigarette, Black shoes and black dress, the puffed up fur of some long dead arctic animal slung about her shoulder. Picture perfection, hiding in plain sight. I’ll never know if she was truly looking at me then, but the wide, plastic lensed sunglasses allowed you to believe she was staring straight at you, and no one else. She stood out form the crowd not simply because everyone else was in jeans. Later I would try to explain to her that there was more that made her special then being over dressed. She had the aura of wonder. She would say it was the aurora of stale martinis.
This woman, who was so abstract to her surroundings, was a b***h. She manipulated, lied and confused those around her. Both intentionally and un-intentionally in equal measure. It is fine to call her this, as this is what she would proclaim herself to be. Embracing the words that had been used against her, turning insult to armour with the flick of a manicured wrist, and a quip from a quick tongue. Untouchable, nothing an enemy said could ever hurt her, she projected a fire-proof image, radiating self-protection in a way that kept her from not only those that would seek to hurt her but also, it would transpire, those who sought to love her.
This projected aura, cold yet electric, was why her box of stored people was so surprising. This woman who seemed to care for nothing but artifice, her secret was her sentiment.
Why tell the story of the oddly dressed women at the bar? This enigmatic beauty, this cold b***h. Because she was a great actress, with a great character, and it is past time she took to the stage.
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