There was a strange girl who lived in the apartment building across from mine. I never actually talked to her, even when in my mind I was dating her, because she only came out of her small studio in the strange hours of the day when other strange people were out. But I could see into her (apartment) from the small window in my kitchen and even though we never acknowledged our separated but interconnected lives, I still felt as if I knew her very well.

She was routinely described as vain. I guess I can’t know that for sure, since I’ve said that I’ve never spoken with her. And by saying so, I know I’d be sacrificing any sort of faith or trust you have in me.

But she was just the type of girl you knew was always accused of that sort of thing.

She developed an odd sort of habit one day. It was 3:00 am and she stormed into her apartment, kicking the stilettos off her feet across the room, throwing her bag onto the ground, its contents spilling across the wood floor. Her makeup was smeared and from my window, she looked rather like a Picasso painting since it was raining outside and the water on the glass confused her image.

She slumped onto the woven chair and dropped her face into her hands, her long blond hair surrounding her. I whispered to her go wash your face, wash it all away down the sink and start over, you can wash it all away until all that’s left is your innocence, and as if choreographed, as I closed one eye and reached out my hand to hers, she left the frame of her large glass window. And suddenly the small rectangular window in her bathroom flew open and she leaned way out, reaching down to pick the small flowers in an overhanging ledge outside the building.
She was soon back in the woven chair with a handful of pink flowers.

But it was the next part, the ensuing moments, that were really quite strange and the reason for my story. She ate the flowers. Picked the petals one by one, with an unsettling smile covered with red lipstick, and placed them on her tongue, chewed, and swallowed.

But that wasn’t all. She next found a framed painting of a sunset, smashed the glass on her marble counter, pulled the thin paper out, and also ate that. She ate the lip-gloss from a small tube, some pages out of The Great Gatsby, a bit of a candle, the hand of a Barbie doll, but I think what really did her off was the diamond ring.

I’ve decided that she ate all of those things because she had been told for so long to try to be beautiful inside, because outside she was hopeless. But because she was the type of girl everyone always calls vain, she decided to eat a bunch of beautiful things in the hopes that they would make her beautiful inside.