for lonesome of our souls

number one: kiss the pistol

I once knew this girl. She was my neighbor years ago, and I do not remember her name.
        I knew that she had recently lost somebody that she had loved, and everybody felt pity for her. I felt pity for her.
        Everybody supposedly comforted her when they were near, rubbed her back, held her hand. The men close to her always kissed her all over the place. They didn't care about her well-being, she just let them kiss, so they kissed.
       Everybody fell in love with her charm, as she was always smiling with tears in her eyes. Everybody loved her, and they thought that she loved them.
       I witnessed all this from my apartment window just next to hers. She never drew her shades.
        But I also witnessed many other things, that nobody ever saw. It's amazing what you'll see if you only watch.
        See, when nobody is at her apartment with her, she did all different things with glazed over eyes. Her sky blue eyes were always glazed over, or full of tears.
        From day to day, I watched her lay on the ground with the record player spinning, but the needle not on the big black disc. The album she played was always the same one, with a grey and blue cover. She sat on the floor and made snow angels in the carpet. Nothing ever came  of it, but she stared at the ceiling blankly, and spread her arms.
        Now, when I think of her, I imagine 70s hippies dancing around her body. The rainbow colored people look happy, and she looks like she's in hell. Sobbing while the hippies circle her. She tries to break out, but they shove her back inside the hell. I don't know why I think that, my brain really is crazy.
        This girl, sometimes she opened her window and sat at the edge of it, body half out, half in. She had a notebook, and she wrote in invisible ink. She mouthed words silently, I could never make out what she was trying to say. I wondered what she was writing at all. Poetry, novel, just nonsense?
        I promise I did not just spend my days watching her from my window. She was just in her apartment so often, it was hard not to notice.
         Her walls were painted forest green, and she used yellow paint out of a small tube to write big letters across her wall. The letters read, "kiss the pistol". She had to have gotten in trouble with the landlord for that. But I began to adore her outright nature.
         Once, the girl took four blankets out of her tiny closet and set them onto her chairs by the table. They looked like people. She spoke to each of them separately, scolding and pointing her finger. Then she folded them up nicely and put them back into the closet.
         I felt like there was no saving her.
         But she was a beautiful girl, so she came into her apartment with a man on her arm often nights. He kissed her and she pulled him into her bed. She smiled sweetly when he stopped, and then he began again. In the morning he left and never came back. I felt pity for the man. She was absurdly persuasive.
          I had only spoken to her a couple times. The words we exchanged were strange and utterly confusing. She told me, in that quiet, sweet voice, that I had to stop stealing the river.
        I never swam in a river, much less stolen it.
        I never saw her face again after she said that to me in the street below our apartment windows.

And that is really all I have to tell you about this girl. I have moved away from that apartment. I don't know anything else. She was probably a manic depressive, or she had dementia. Either way, she was broken, and I feel pity for wherever she is now. I hope that people are taking care of her now, because I am not there to help her if she does something to harm herself.