Dear sweet Ms. Ebony Brown

I loved her.

No matter what I did to please her, she never seemed to reciprocate my feelings.

It was during the summertime. I was wandering through the park, contemplating various colourful suicide methods, when she came along. 

Dressed in a summer dress that resembled the inside of a runny yolk. Hair as dark as the burnt chestnuts I foraged from the fire after Christmas dinner, when everyone seemed to disappear into their rooms and call it a night whilst I remained: sole, solitary. 

And her skin. Fuck, her skin! As dark and as polished as the hood of a vintage mustang that some fat, rich white guy likes to collect and store in his fancy garage in the suburbs of some prissy neighbourhood with a generic name straight out of a clinical surgery. Her pristine outer casing was only shattered by sporadic indentations that would simply be classified as 'blemishes'.

Anyway, I decided to speak to her, for I desired her. I desired to fall into her inky deepness and explore her depths. I wished to experience the intense pleasures of a foreign love which I had never known. I wished to placate her feelings and bear her ramblings of those things that most men fail to comprehend and those which women value above all else. But most of all, I wished to experience the pleasure of defiance; of rebelling against the strict values which had been bounced off my exterior for many years.

When I approached her, she seemed perplexed by my interest in the book that she was reading. Naturally after inviting her for a drink (after which we proceeded to fornicate passionately and repeatedly on the polished wooden floors of my apartment), I made it clear that our love was simply an act of rebellion. A simple move to oppose the social norms of what my race and culture detailed for me. She agreed. I could not imagine that I would ever develop feelings for her.

At the time, it seemed like a practical idea. She would provide me with both physical satisfaction and a regular topic of discussion at family gatherings, while I would provide the perfect companion for her various social gatherings and art exhibitions. However, I failed to consider the omission of personal conversations as 'pillow talk' after satiating my hunger. Sure enough, we began to develop feelings for each other. Thereafter we began to parade our taboo relationship to my immediate family and social groups. When we grew tired of the lack of attention our relationship brought, I proposed to her. The shock and disapproval plastered on my parents' faces served only to fuel the adrenaline rush I felt. Naturally, this sort of relationship could not be tolerated by them, so I was promptly disowned, with my new love declared as a 'blemish' on the family lineage.

We never planned to have children. It all happened so suddenly. After the baby, she feel into a deep depression. Postpartum is what they call it. Doctors said that it may take years for her to recover. After the birth of our daughter, I lost my wife. It's like...we welcomed a new life at the expense of hers. She grew terse every time I spoke to her. Every move I made seemed to annoy and anger her even more. She took to carrying carving knives around the house. At family barbecues she constantly rambled about a new abstract art project she was working on. "It's gonna be big," is what she said. "I can just feel it. I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. Look." At which point we were prompted to touch the chicken flesh on her gaunt arms. When asked what the subject matter of her painting was, she would always wave away the person and mumble that "it's something big."

I soon grew tired of living with her. Both of us: the baby and me. We grew tired of her. I once caught her shaking the baby and screaming uncontrollably when she wouldn't stop crying. Our sex life suffered the most. She would not let me touch her; shrinking away the moment I reached out my pale fingers towards her. The rare moment when she did let me into her fortress was riddled with awkwardness and pain. She groaned and cried, and not in the sexy way either. Under the bright, clinical light in our bedroom I could plainly see where all her imperfections lay. The skin on her face was taut and seem to stretch unnaturally under the weight of her bones. She was frail and her skin had lost that radiance which it had once possessed. My skin, which used to pale in comparison to her rich mahogany, now seemed to exude a healthier tan compared to her now unhealthy complexion. I never mounted her again.

I missed her. Despite the fact that our initial pairing was simply an act of defiance on my part, it quickly developed into so much more. The days leading up to the end of summer were times of both distress and frustration. On several occasions she wielded her knife at me. On numerous occasions she threatened the lives of both me and our daughter. It grew too much. For her.

The police said that it was suicide. It was pretty obvious that she had grown very unhappy in those last few weeks of summer. I remember thinking at the funeral, "Why me?" It struck me as odd that none of her acquaintances from the art museum ever showed up. Standing in front of that gaping hole as they lowered my wife's corpse into it really brought the shocking reality that I had lost the love of my life to the forefront. As I stood there clutching our 5 month old, I realized how tiny and insignificant our lives really were. And how lonely I would be now. My family had abandoned me and Ebony had made no mention of any living familial connections.

It was just me and my daughter.

Us against the world.

I threw her engagement ring into the grave. I resolved to take my daughter to a local church and have her baptized. 

-"Elle vit dans ma cœur."