To J.

dedicated to one of my best friends

She was a fire.

She had this way of crawling into the deepest valleys of memory, sprawling her image over the moments in your life. Where all at once she existed in a single fell swoop, the permanence of her snow-dipped hands like ghosts in sheets.

She moved with a heavy energy, a subtle fervor for every experience nearly lost in the weight and magnitude of her soul. Tragically trapped in the frame of her furious emotion- she felt violently, relentlessly.

With a razor she tried to quell the beast, to conquer the ashen poison within.

She was unprepared to face the immensity of her power, the magnificence of her passion, and the crushing lust for death.

There was a wasted holiness about her, something sacred about the overwhelming strength of her devotion.

The soft charcoal rings around her eyes a stain on the child she could never be. She knew too much of madness, of vindictiveness, of pure love.

The eyes: large and arresting, like fragments of emeralds and diamonds clinging to each other. Eyes that kill, that tore into everything. Laced with brilliant ocean blues. Eyes like the Earth that cradled the world in its curve. A complete embodiment of her spirit, so beautiful that sometimes they seemed apart from her body, separate entities- live jewels.

PC: Mary Magdalene- Caravaggio