It goes on doesn't it. Life, I mean. The days flying by with a mad flapping of feathers, desperate sounds of an unseen bird caught in a closed-off room, I am alone in this stasis called 'Life Without Lesley'. While the clock tick-tocks and chimes on the perpetual half-hour and the people struggling in my therapy group telling each other of their pain, mine too, afterwards staggering out onto the rain sodden downtown street, cars honking and work again tomorrow, ominously looming, where my ass will be put on the grill, like Dickens' Mr. Gradgrind: "Stick to the facts, Helene. Only the FACTS!" Hard Times indeed.
Other women are reminding me of Lesley these days. The schizophrenic with the long, strawberry-blond hair and Irish lilt who talks incessantly about all the conspiracies of her life. Lesley had to watch out for 'them' too. The artist who lives upstairs on her disability pension, never painting any more when once so brilliant, I've seen her paintings as I saw Lesley's, and know the hell-hole of that dried-out place: the empty crater where all that art used to be. Lesley too was there, her long hair so like those beautiful models who shimmer in Man Ray's 1920s Parisian portraits, their beauty now bone-dust like Lesley. So like Lesley! And last night I made a quiche in prep for tonight's dinner, the Last Supper every night, the days piling up like logs washed ashore on a west-coast beach and me, scuttling, crab-like back under another rock, to hide in that dark beause that's all I know in this blank thing they call 'life' since Lesley died. Life without Lesley. Being sucked down, down, down into that syrupy vortex, spiraling deeper and deeper into the depghs of me, where death hides waiting, biding its time while the clock chimes an enthereal faraway bong...bong...bong...bong, whispering: "Lesley is gone, gone, gone, gone."
C'est la vie my friend. C'est la vie.
Written todya by Helene.