She was a quiet girl with a loud mind and big dreams, and arms that weren't quite long enough to reach them.
She was an artist who wrote her heart out in hopes of creating something beautiful and worth living for, but she'd tear the page up and say, "It's not good enough."
She was her own worst critic. I was her biggest fan. And I was the only one who mourned when she decided to stop creating poetry because it was taking her nowhere.
And I watched her change the way she dressed, the way she stood and the way she talked. She traded her oversized black hoodies for pencil skirts and shoulder bags. I watched her get into a good college and get straight A's. I watched her date a pre-med student who played football and fucked other girls behind her back. I watched her insides deteriorate while her outsides remained pristine.
Last year, I watched her throw herself off a building. And everyone who didn't know her said it was because her boyfriend was an asshole, or that her grades were plummeting and the administration was threatening to take away her scholarship. But her professors knew her grades were more than fine, and her boyfriend knew she never really loved him.
They cried and lit candles for her, quietly whispering about how sad it was. "She would have been a great lawyer," they said.
And I wept. I wept because she wanted to be remembered for something different. If only she hadn't let go of her pen, the world would've kept another great poet.
