Poe, for all his satire, was correct when he named the death of a
beautiful woman the height of poetry.
I think this as I stand in front of a mirror, taking in the sheer Thanateros of it all, birth and death and love and hate not as dichotomy but as elements in equilibrium. I think this as I meet my own eyes and remember when I used to recite myself to my reflection each night, as if that would make the lies true.
Lauren, all of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, who every time allowed herself to get closer to the truth, but never to reach the correct response.
Who understood she was dying, but not the why or how. Who didn’t yet understand death as something beautiful until she was fifteen, and cursed herself for weakness in the face of God.
There is only so long a mask can be kept alive, even one so perfect. I threw her a funeral at sixteen years old, and wept in front of the same mirror which had made her real.
I murdered the girl I used to be, and tried to take her place, to pretend that nothing had happened, but there are truths you can’t unlearn. It had been discovered prematurely, and I was still there, stuck in a life I had been so close to escaping without anything going wrong, only to trip and fall steps before the finish line.
When I go back on long weekends and end up picking up my sister, my feet take me to practice first, and for all the days spent in the sun with Julie and Marianne, all the discussions with Jack about anything from socio-political theory to betting on blackjack, Dean is the one who pulls out the chair I used to always claim, and introduces me to the new kids as “the best mythology person ever on the team”.
He does not question the change in name, and I do not question how he knows the new one. He does not question my clothes or my hair or my jewelry, all things picked up in the year and a half since I left. We whisper jokes to each other and draw rude pictures on the scratch paper and everything flows so much better when the dams have been destroyed.
Cause I think he understands, in a way the others can’t, that sometimes the old self dies. That it’s freeing and beautiful.
Julie might know now, and I’m proud of her for it, but she can’t quite grasp the before in the same way, just how thorough the charade had to be.
It wasn’t a slow transition (hah), it hit me like a truck in the middle of a midnight breakdown, and it was beautiful and horrific and no words can quite describe the feeling that was somewhere between euphoria and existentialism, hope and dread.
It was like a supernova, a beautiful death. A good death. A true release. An explosion that destroyed everything in its wake.
And Ama started offering nicknames, told me about a girl named Lo dead too young, but who had left a mark, and I figured that was good enough. Close enough the old name yet also one I could claim without outright being a conman.
Just something close, something really close.
And then she got scared, reminded me of stories from the wars about what happened to people who were different, and reminded me of stories from the myths about who got killed first.
I talked about selling Eguzkilore charms at school and she told me a story about a blue eyed euskaldun being used as a ritual sacrifice.
You know, fun chats like that.
And I think I understood, to a degree, where she was coming from. She just thought the problem was one of those… less mundane ones. That the danger was greater, more profound, than it actually was. I was worried about harassment, not damnation.
The amount of books and lectures on changeling lore that accompanied this span of time was not lost on me.
But it really wasn’t so grand. It was simple, and it was quick, and though my train of thought in that instant was devoid of the same level of flowery prose that Poe brought out for his imaginary lovers, it still seemed, at least to me, just as beautiful and profane.
The Death of A Beautiful Woman, and I grieved alone, for the person I once was, and for who I was supposed to be. Yet I also celebrated, for her suffering had finally come to an end.
And then, without waiting for anyone else, I moved on. It is easier to be alive when the people around you have never seen your ghost.
And when I stand in front of the mirror which has seen so many false confessions, and feel content to simply behold myself, without reminding myself what I’m supposed to be, I have to smile at the closest thing Lauren has to a headstone.
Because I don’t see her ghost anymore. Her beauty is not in her haunting, but in her end. She is finally gone, laid to rest.
And in her place stands someone content to simply be.
I like to think she’d enjoy knowing that.
So for all of the grotesqueness and mundanity of it, Poe’s axiom prevails.
There is nothing as poetic as the Death of a Beautiful Woman.
But perhaps, just maybe, I may be a bit more experienced to comment on the subject than the “bereaved lover”.