not the kind of girl you take home

I had a theory for all of this once, but it is not one that makes sense- I've been thinking that if you had not touched her, she would not have died, when the truth is, touching her or not, she was dying the instant you saw her, and would have died had you never seen her; but having never seen her, her death would have meant nothing to you, having never touched her, her death would have been a mere moment of regret, like the moment when you hear as a that the cutie who sat in the first row of your ninth-grade Latin was killed in a car accident recently; some pretty person already unreachable to you moved yet further away, and taken off the chessboard completely. But having known and touched her, her death assumes an air of tragedy, and that is something you can always hide behind and always be selfish because of and always, secretly, be grateful for.

It's funny, really, that the death of good men in battle is fitting to me, for there is a sort of sad glory in it. The deaths that make me angry and bitter are these tiny deaths, the deaths of whores and actresses in the slums and back staircases of Art. They are only butterflies, and live for a day to die the next; they tell you as much when you meet them, but the men who court them live forever, and write plays about them, operas and films, convert their squalid little lives into the things of great beauty (and often, little sense) and all to celebrate the life of the woman they betrayed and estranged, the woman who had nothing and lost all and yet forgave them that betrayal.

I don't forgive you. I never will. I will never forgive Alfredo for driving Violetta mad. And more so, I will never forgive his father for asking her to sacrifice her life with her lover for a cold slow death in a Paris flophouse.

I hate you because you told her she was worthy of love and understanding and abandoned her when she needed you most. For all the actresses, all the dancers, all the pretty whores and showgirls who were taken and broken on the wheel of love, for poor Maryanne, who decided to place her faith in young Wilhelm Meister on the very night he decided that she really was a two-timing slut, Maryanne who died alone, for all of them, who knew the world wasn't a bad place if you didn't expect too much from it, and then you come in and tell them that there are no limits, that love really is all you need, and you tell them this until they start to believe you, until they start to trust you, and then you leave and take this beautiful new purity with you when you go. And they never stop loving you, even knowing what they've lost, what you've denied them. Even knowing that in you, they only exchanged one pretty mask for another. To them, to be love is worth that steep a price.

But all I will ever see is that they loved you and you failed them. That they trusted you to understand, because you said you would always understand and you failed. That you said nothing would separate you, only to be torn away from her by your own pride. That when the chips where down you deserted the girl who loved you.

And you lied to yourself if you thought she was anything more or less than a girl. And she, for all her poverty and her sins, she outshone you to the last because she never doubted, she never wavered. When you met her she did not believe in love, and when you left her she was an apostle to your faith and martyred herself to it while you doubted, while you seethed with rage and jealousy and left her to face her death alone.