Lara’s Song
We met in-between the lines of a craigslist rooms/shared add:
“Female seeks female roommate for summer sublet. No thugs, no drugs.”
Upon meeting her, she looked me up and down,
convinced I was no thug,she asked me if I did any drugs. I told her I’ve smoked
a lot of marijuana. She laughed and said, that’s no drug, that’s a way of life. She laughed
and drank cherry kool-aid spiked with vodka on a Wednesday morning.
She had a cat named See-Saw, who was never completely awake,
his head always tilting from side to side and walking in diagonals across the floor,
little paws criss-crossing over each other to head butt the wall by the furnance.
She liked to sing to him on Sunday nights when the church bells rang for evening mass
and his head would move along with her tune, drifting in harmony.
Her most sung song was “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”
and her name was Lara B. Sanders.
During that two months we lived together, I never saw any sadness
that weighed on her mind. Sure, we were not that close, we co-
existed in our shared space, waiting for the leaves to change and take us home.
But, when she danced to the Queer as Folk theme song
or dusted her giant fake pink hydrangea flowers that she always kept on the kitchen counter
I never would have guessed that on July 23, 2012, I would find her
hanging from the exposed pipe in her bedroom,
swinging side to side like See-Saw’s head,
mouth open wide to belt out the chorus of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,”
lips as read as vodka spiked kool-aid,
dark brown eyes looking right above me
as if she was seeing something new, something beautiful, something I could never see.
Her name was Lara B. Sanders.
I was the one who found her, the one who screamed when I could breath again, the one
who untied the extension cord from the ceiling, the one who held
her body and touched the red, purple lines on her neck, the one who called 911
panicked and crying, shaking and stumbling across the words I had to spit
from my mouth to make them clear. The one who ran to the door and back to the room and back
to the door, waiting for the ambulance to come and I was the one would let them into the house that was not mine and I was the one the EMT touched lightly on the shoulder and told me
it was too late and I was the one who heard the medic pronounce her dead and
I was the one who was gently pulled aside when they passed with the body bag and I
was the one who sat on the porch stairs as ambulance pulled away with the body
that had once been Lara. I was the one who sat there and tried to remember
what it was to breath without gasping. I was the one who stood up, shaking like a sapling
in the breese, who pulled the door open with shaking hands, sat on the couch that was not mine
and held the cat that was not mine and sitting there,
knowing nothing of the Sanders or how to contact them, I was the one
who sat in the room alone, slowly head tilting from side to side,
waiting for a song that would never be sung.
