I may sound egocentric, cause even if I am talking about Jane I always find a way to make it about me.
I blinked once, twice, trying to adapt my eyes to the dark room full of mirrors. Even then I was able to make out the outline of her silhouette. It wasn’t easy at first, but then she began to swing, to move her body to the upbeat music, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt to whom that body belonged to.
She wasn’t looking at me.
Her carelessness wasn’t out of some kind of superiority complex. It wasn’t her way of telling me that I was nothing to her. She just didn’t notice me. She just didn’t know I was there too.
My mom taught me to be a good, kind girl. A girl’s girl.
Let me tell you it’s not always the easiest thing to do, especially if you need to be a girl’s girl with the girl of your dreams. When she met Jane for the first time, even she was mesmerised by her presence only. In a couple of weeks, she became Jane’s biggest fan. She had never liked any of my friends before.
“You should try to make her feel welcome here, love”, she said to me one night. I had just put milk in my hot tea, watching the little storm landing inside the cup. I used to think that was the same phenomenon of ocean’s waves crushing against the Scotland cliffs. Hot trails of steam pointed at the ceiling.
My hands stilled, I watched the woman who gave birth to me under thick eyelashes, her deep blue eyes so similar to Jane’s. She smiled at me, and I simply nodded in response.
That was the first time I found myself thinking how many similarities my mom and Jane shared.
Jane had to change school in the middle of the year and when she popped in my lit class one glance was enough to see in her everything that I prayed God for.
She was the new student and I felt sorry for her. No teenage girl should face that kind of war at such young age. But Jane was brave, and she came from the north. Nothing could make her flesh tremble.
In less than a semester everybody was talking about the girl who joined their lit classes or arts clubs in the middle of the year. The whispering in the hallway started to sound like her name, one syllable murmured like a prayer.
Blonde hair, glass eyes, round heart-shaped lips, red cheeks. She didn’t notice the boys attention, the praise of her professors.
She would be found alone under a weeping willow tree during lunch time, trying to memorise Shakespeare’s sonnets, hair in the wind, long sleeves hiding delicate fingers.
All of a sudden, every girl in the school was Jane-ed.
And every boy was in love.
Once she came into my life, all my values broke down. She became my moral compass. It wasn’t really a surprise for me, she was a nice girl. The nicest of all. Not trace of malice would have been found in her soul.
We started spending lunch together, under a weeping willow tree. I learnt about Shakespeare to please her and I really thought I had her, for the way her eyes crinkled around the corner morphing them into a shining sun. For the way she spoke French, laughing at me whenever I failed to replicate basic phrases. Little did I know that she belonged to no one.
I was surprised when our conversations turned into confessions.
“Do you think I look like Juliet?”
I already knew what she was talking about even if we hadn’t spoken about it before.
I was silent for a long time.
“Do you think you look like Juliet?”
“I think I won’t blame someone for assuming it”.
“Do you feel like Juliet?”
“Juliet killed herself for love”.
“For desperation”, I corrected her. But she wasn’t mad about it. She seemed to ponder it.
“I would never kill myself for a man’s tragedy”.
“But would you kill yourself for your art?”
“I would probably kill for my art, yes”.
I smiled. A passing cloud obscured the sun. “It is not the same”.
She didn’t answer me back. I still think about that conversation.
Time passed slowly, but my devotion started to consume me, reaching a breaking point. It was wild and unruly, and I wanted it to crash me over.
“We should really be best friends”, she whispered another time. I wasn’t paying attention to her, but I was well aware of her body next to mine.
“You think?” I asked.
She laughed. She thought I was joking. She didn’t even contemplate the possibility that I didn’t want that.
And she was right.
And so we became best friends.
She was delicate like a November rose, when the maroon petals started to fade away, not strong enough to stick to its core. I had to shelter her from the freezing wind of the ocean. Even in those moments, when she smiled at me, I pictured myself as the weak one.
She dictated the way I viewed myself and the way others treated me. She turned unpopular activities into popular 90s trends. She made the rules but she wasn’t aware of it. She made it look effortless, made it look like it was her nature. It really was.
I struggled to keep up, but I tried and tried and tried again because I couldn’t fail her.
I shared with her my favourite poems finding exhilarating how in each verse I could stumble upon bits of the girl I would die to be. I would die for.
She was thrilled to be part of something so glorious as our friendship. She told me so, when I read to her my favourite Sylvia Plath’s poem.
“I feel lucky to have you”, she murmured by the light of a candle. We were sat on my bed, leg crossed and eyes tired. Next to her, I felt invincible. Invisible. “I’m sure you’ll do great things”.
Guys came for her, and some of them came for me too, though never in the same way. Jane was the brightest star of their sky, an entire galaxy where to build a home of their own. A constellation was visible in her deep sea irises. They wrote ballads for her, rhyming her name with melodic French words. She was the artist and the muse.
Love and obsession aren’t the same thing even if they can look alike. I thought I loved Jane but I didn’t. I was deeply obsessed with her.
“How can you look at her and not see the best version of yourself?” my little sister asked me one day. I didn’t know how to replicate. I secretly agreed with her.
I hated myself for that.
I hated my little sister.
And then I hated Jane.
Jane and I always talked about escaping the small town on the coast, where we lived. She was hopeful, trusting. I was too cynical, too bitter to think it could be possible. My father wouldn’t allow me to go away if it wasn’t for a good reason, a law degree. A good investment.
“I can feel it here”, she said one day, putting her hand on her sternum. “It is going to happen”.
I couldn’t disrupt that sweet nothing. And so I lied to her when I replied “Me too”.
I wasn’t searching for love, but it happened anyway. I didn’t think that spending time with Jane was doing me any favour, too self absorbed to pay any attention, but then he came around looking like someone who could make my dreams come true.
Jane wasn’t happy about that.
For just once, someone wasn’t looking at her and it felt like a conquest. I still don’t know why, at the same time, I was angry with him for picking me over her.
I loved him, though. Or so I thought.
“He’s a good guy, but he isn’t right for you”, Jane kept saying.
I didn’t listen. She was constantly changing her companions, flying around like a butterfly. Still she was the flower all the same. She didn’t value her relationships back then. She always told me her true love was her poetry and she wouldn’t risk it for a man. So she pushed through, she found people who would have burnt the world for her and call them friends.
She made them recite Romeo and Juliet, loud and proud, clapping and blushing like a little girl. They weren’t aware of her power. She played them so easily.
I handed her my copy of Othello. It was used and scribbled on the margins with annotations of my most personal reflections. She looked up with big eyes, like she expected nothing more – and nothing less.
Her lips curved upward in a full, glorious smirk.
“No”, I replied cause that time I had the answer she was searching for. “You’re not Juliet”.
Ten years later, I am still here writing about her. A lot of things have changed, a lot of them stayed the same.
Jane became a poet. She moved from the countryside to the big city of London. She found the love of her life during a reading in a club. In her letters she promised me I will meet her partner soon. Every time she wrote to me, the ink on the paper was a bit smudged. She loves to write with fountain pens. I often insist there’s no point in romanticising our correspondence, FaceTime and whatsapp are way easier tools. But she isn’t a fan of technology and I didn’t expect anything else from her.
I can picture her, rolling her eyes with a sad smile curling her plump lips. She always answers in the same way.
“Life would be so boring if we couldn’t pretend to be who we want to be”.
She became who she wanted to be. In fairness, she always was.
Since she came in as a new student in my lit class. Since she read Shakespeare sonnets under that willow tree. When she asked me questions to which she already knew the answer.
I was obsessed with Jane, then I loved her and I hated her. All of these things are true and coexist, even now.
I really can’t rest most of the nights. Flashbacks of my girlhood, shadows of dreams I can no longer remember, faded in the nick of time.
When I sleep, I dream about her.
And when I put the blade into my best friend heart, I’m not sorry until I see that it is my white shirt that wrenches in deep red blood.
I know. I, once again, lost the thread.
I was talking about Jane.
