Alexandra: The Girl Who Is Dead

I grew up with a girl named Alexandra, but I don’t know her anymore. She liked all the things I like: Disney movies, ropa vieja, ice-skating. She had the same body and brain as me and then, one day, she died. When I call her, my own phone rings. It’s the damnedest thing.

I knew a girl named Alexandra until I was a teenager and then I didn’t know her anymore, but I tried. I narrated her life in the third person because she wasn’t me. I watched her failures with great disdain because they were somebody else’s failures. Alexandra wore the cheapest, inkiest kohl in the hugest quantities and the scratchiest lines all around her wide baby’s eyes. Alexandra smoked a lot. I smoke quite a lot, too. We think that we can be gods that way. We still have that in common.

She used to touch her blossoming skin all over in the bath, in bed. It must have felt like a revelation at the time. My skin is not like hers was; it is coarse. Ragged.

Alexandra knew her worth in exact numerical values: her bra size, her height, her weight, every number an entry on the statistics card of her value. She was ravenous for attention and chewed up every bite of it that she could get, eating too fast, bloating too hard. Alexandra’s stomach hurt when she had too many questing eyes on her. Alexandra did not understand how not to make mistakes. I do, now. When eyes are on me I meet them firmly with my own. My eyes are steely, reptilian, unblinking. I don’t giggle anymore.

She told me in a dream once, I can feel my body jiggle even when I want to think about other things. My breasts flirt with men without my permission and now men think I want them even when my eyes are staring right at the ground. She giggled her little girl’s giggle and that was the dream. Alexandra is dead. We are not friends.

Alexandra was in love one time, twice, who knows, she couldn’t keep track. Alexandra was never not in love. She believed so wholly in men; they were the ones with the means to save her. She believed that every one of them wanted to. Alexandra had heard since she was a child that she was not to get in cars with men, but she became a teenager and then an adult, and nobody could stop her from doing it. She was always in love and she got her way and then, one day, she didn’t.

There was a thing someone did to Alexandra, no, to me, or to both of us; someone did something sometime forever ago, and now I can’t remember much, it seems so hazy, it hurts so bad. I can’t feel much but the hurt stays close.

Alexandra didn’t believe in much, not her family or her friends or any damn fool thing she learned in school, but she did believe in men. Trusted them utterly. Me, I don’t believe in anything, I’ve never believed a thing my whole short life; I have that virtue. But Alexandra, inside her it was like a sunny plain, a wide and bottomless Midwestern flatness, and men felt so real and possible. There were so many. She loved so hard.

I don’t know what I think about Alexandra now. I think of her sadly because she was my friend and she died. I think that I loved her but it is me who bears the brunt of these ragged dry scars that men left all over her body and I can’t forgive her for that. She is dead and I am full of her memories, the brutal men who liked it when she screamed, when she cried. Her neck smelled like nectar and felt like down but mine is rashy and harsh. Alexandra was lucky. She got to escape and she got to leave me here, with her body still jiggling its accursed eternal jiggle in my skin, with her dreams ground to stinking dust by my clenched fist of a heart.

(Image credit to Internet Poetry)