she sat and listened to strings because it sounds like mourning, like grief, like unconquerable sorrow pouring and pouring. a knife in the abdomen. she wore that baby blue dress, bird boned, and she'd sit in the windowsill nurturing knees to her chest and watch the way rain married itself upon the glass, watched how it grew a dazed smoke each time her breath crossed it. how strangely, how intimately she would live in moments like this. you don't touch her; she'd startle. she doesn't want to be moved. macabre, maiden to the night, wearing its glow like a lustful silk. this is the company she wants: weeping moon, pouting sky. it is not you.