eulogy

A pastor might say this of the evident equation encompassing my life when the time comes that I am more gravestone than human:

She lived her life like it was a scratched record. She didn't own a record player, and if someone had asked her to set up the music, she might have made a joke pertaining to her own incompetency, and flirted her way over to the window to stare at the street below. It would be only the silence that would really recognize that she couldn't even start up the soundtrack to the moment, but eventually someone would grab her hand, smile at her porous nature, and begin the tune. It always started in the same place, and she was constantly surrounded by too many people who were far more enchanted with the idea of understanding her inconsistencies that they ended up listening to songs twice. It would start again and she would fall back onto the same leather couch, still moist from last night's indiscretions, and begin everything all over again. She had learned something from the last time, but nobody else ever seemed to. If they had, they might have politely excused themselves from her smoky, stinking presence to find a space with a little more sunlight and fresh air, but they always stuck around until it was too late for either of them to change. It was in this way that she collected all of her friends, like murals plastered to a decaying wall, adorning a worthless room with art that would never be seen by anyone who could ever appreciate it. Then, when the nighttime had finally struck, and the candles were burning low enough to make an impression, she would light the whole room on fire and start over in a new place, with a new sound, and a new scent. Marking up the path that she walked on with ashes and legends, she travelled around like a wafting raincloud. She was rain in all senses save for the fact that she never really nourished anything. She was more like a flood than a sprinkle. She was more like a fire than a flood. She was more like destruction than anything else. One day, she ran out of options, and decided (since she had been telling everybody all along) that she was just always meant to be the narrator to her own thoughts rather than the character in her own life. In the dead of winter, when the chill was something that was more of a comfort in assuring her of her pulse than anything else, she watched the moon that was only hers--there were nights when she thought that the moon belonged only to her-and she would stare at the face on the other side, conversing with it on the nature of existence and the truth that she hadn't ever appreciated a single person in her whole life. The sick little game she played with all of her healthy players was the same as arsenic in cookies; you didn't taste her poison until you were on the brink of death. She had enough heart, however, to leave then. That was the moment when she burned down the next room, when all of her cohorts were chapped with venom and sinking into the blackness that she had manufactured for them to wallow in. Pulling up the curtains so they could watch the day around them grow bright with flame, she would kiss each of them on the mouth and apologize for her lack of conscience. She wasn't ever diagnosed. It could have been anything that brought around the end. But, for the good of all man kind, the end finally came. She's gone now, and everybody can breathe a little easier, fall asleep a little quicker, and pretend that they'll miss her more than she is going to miss herself. Nobody read her writing anyway, so her "purposeful existence" was most likely another trick of the eye or slide of hand. She always pretended like she didn't understand magic tricks, but really, she was living one all along. She just had to wait to until everyone was hooked enough for the final stage of her biggest trick yet to be truly set up for her; she was to disappear completely and never be found. 

You were all hooked and you played right in. 
She would thank you if you were here, but then again, if she were here, we all wouldn't be.