Oh baby girl, you are dead.

Dead dead, not nearly dead. You are dead and if things were different you would still be dead, only death would press on you a prettier kiss, a gentle tongue across the grooves of your teeth and the promise of a celebrated summer.

In your story, the hero takes a fall, but it’s been only moments since you learned that girls on the edge of a ledge or a curb or a cusp could never really be heroes. I walk alone, you said, but to who? Not to your parents, too busy with their lives and their spats and their dramas who couldn’t hear your voice even when you threw it hard at them and heard it shatter off the walls. Not your sister with veins thick with forget-me treats. Only the music teacher with her straight gaze and fingers that hypnotised guitar strings and piano teeth and drum skins ever knew you. I see you, she said. I hear you.  

You were words and music and a voice like honey dripped through honeycomb, but what’s the good in a voice when the strings of life are hanging out of a body like a tattered musical stave fluttering in a gale? Fifteen and never been kissed, won’t be missed. Now, you are one of the People Who Died, a name on a list, and, if they find out how, why, who, you’ll be a Stupid Girl too lonely to see her stupidity.

It flashed before you died: a flick-book of dumb. A playlist for Victims of a Foolish Heart.  A girl slipping between the cracks in the stars when the soundtrack of the parents fighting got too loud. A girl sliding through the jaws of a 24 hour McDonalds to count pennies on a table sticky with the spilled dreams of someone else in jeans. A girl wearing the hurled milkshake tossed from shattered arms of classmates displaced. And the man, the man, with a glove full of music saying hush little one, come with me, come with me.

If you were not dead, you could press a finger to the lonely blues of the bruises, or the tacky rhythm of a head broke open. You could grapple with the songs pouring out of the crack in your mind, force them back inside so you could sing them some other time, after the pain of being you had receded.

But you can’t. 

With the last of you, you fling a song into the ether. Your swansong, a psalm, an aria to all that you might have been. Ashes to Ashes, dust to burnt up cigarette papers dampened in a whorl of effluent and piss. Past a soup of dreams spat out with the toothpaste and undigested heartbreak of everyone who thought there’d be more than this, you throw your dying song back into the sewer and hope it finds its way to someone who’ll listen.

On a grey Monday, a few weeks from now when they’ve pretended to mourn and gone back to their petty fights and canvassed heartache, a high school music teacher will take out her phone. Listen to this, she’ll say, thinking that she’s going to point out the cymbal that punctuates Bohemian Rhapsody and there it’ll be, Remember me, your voice, your dying song, competing with the Poor Boy and the static and the disinterested ears of classmates displaced, the bitter tang of milkshake still on their lips.