Ophelia of the Porcelain Bathtub

Long after Claire left in the most selfish of ways, long after the funeral flowers crumpled and fell, long after her body began to turn to earth, she contacted me.
Artifacts of hers resurfaced, often in the times when I was just beginning to forget. At times when everything was getting back to the normality I once knew, she would leave reminders for me. When a possession of hers found it’s way into my life again, fading memories of Claire would wash over me with as much pain as beauty. Claire, the Ophelia of her porcelain bathtub, would float to the surface of my thoughts with an unearthly grace. There I would view her, the color-kissed flowers twisted in her golden curls, and her soaking clothes spread wide and mermaid-like on the bathwater’s surface, before they pulled her down from her melodious lay. I could see the cold water over-flowing the tub’s lips; crimson waves of life splashing down on the tile floor, soon to be mopped up, up and away.
The times when the rolling sound of Claire’s laughter wasn’t echoing in my ears, when I couldn’t remember her favorite color, or the way she chewed her food, she would whisper to me from her celestial grave, where she went to be forevermore.
Whenever I unearthed an old backpack, came across a cardboard box, or looked under the bed, I would find pieces of her life, scattered like ashes in the wind. A half used tube of strawberry lip-gloss, a note passed during class, a record she let me borrow, never to be returned. What were the most mundane items of her short life now held a great importance in her sullen death. Ghost-like in their presence, they had a haunting beauty, which on quiet days moved me to softly trickling tears. The reminders would cause me to travel back in time to our youthful days together. In my mind I would revisit the town swimming pool on a hot afternoon, the crowded movies, or the old diner, with it’s salty french-fry smell. We didn’t know it then, but these would be the places and pieces that strung together Claire’s last year of life.
From time to time, it was nice to find things from our days of wide-eyed wondering and precocious innocence. It was almost comforting to know that she existed in some form, sending me little reminders, holding within them more words than could ever be spoken. I liked seeing the things that made up the mosaic of Claire’s dolefully vacuous life, which held a desperate sadness she never let me know of. Her death left me with more sorrow and anger than I ever knew, and I prayed many a time that it was all a dream, soon to be awoken from. Yet despite how much I wished that she were a being stronger than memory and stale air, sometimes I just wanted her to leave me alone.

*Age 16 (Winter 2005). Published in 2006 Halyard. Winner of BU Special Achievement in Fiction.