An unfinished love song, a eulogy.

The only girl I ever loved was seventeen, with ivory skin, eyes like winter mornings, and hair to rival the autumn in which we met.

There was a certain inexplicability to the beauty and the chaos of that hair: no ordinary shade of red but a blistering conflagration of vermilion and rust, cascading past her elbows in a cacophony of curls. She had makeup like graffiti and a gaze like shattered glass, but none of it compared to her voice, which rang through the air with vivid incandescence, and lingered in the silence like a trace of falling silver.

As the phoenix ascends from an insensibility of ash, so the girl I love emerged from the dust of her broken home, seeking vitality in an apathetic age. Her dissonance held the promise of new beginnings, but its transience left the tragedy of absence in her wake; in the end, it was discordant silence that carved her memory into my skin.

I never asked what happened to her, never tried to find out. It involved a razor and her wrists, and that was all I cared to know. Sometimes I like to remember her as an angel, all flame and song and shattered possibility, teaching me to live again. But other times, without meaning to, I envision a car on a fog- shrouded highway, hurtling into oncoming traffic: her blood on the windshield, mine on the seats. We should have died together, her and I.

In the melancholy traces of half-forgotten melodies, her voice stitches silently through the fabric of my reality, my infinity echoing with the virtuoso of her grief. She never knew I loved her, and yet some nights I dream of her still: starlight trailing from her fingertips, tangling in that fiery hair. In my dreams she is alive, and she is crying: my universe contained within the confines of each cyan iris, her mouth moving softly in mine.

It has been two years since I last heard the melody of the beautiful, broken girl who bared to me her renegade heart and a soul like tinted glass. She had a voice like the landslide of a thousand falling stars, but she never found a song to match the violence in her eyes.