William Frost died on a Monday.
He slammed his index finger in car door that morning and spent the next ten minutes, as he crossed the company parking lot in hurried steps, furiously shaking his hand, biting his lower lip to ease the pain, and mentally cursing his own stupidity.
He stepped into the elevator following the flow of bodies and found himself jammed between a short, plump woman and a man with horn rimed glasses and amazingly high cheekbones. There was a burning sensation between the first and second knuckle of his finger, his car door, he assumed. The lift rose steadily, silently through the building, ascending thirty some odd floors in a matter of seconds, shoulders and briefcases nudged past him as the silver doors slid open with a hum.
Alone he was in the elevator after the exodus of people with another woman whom he had never met before and certainly would have liked to meet again.
William Frost was not a talkative man, but when the occasion called, he tried very hard.
“Hi.”
At first she did not notice him, dismissing the murmured and barely audible greeting.
He was about to try again, but decided against it seeing how his first attempt failed. Long, brown hair that curled slightly resting in the crook of her back, a glossy sheen of blood red across her lips, emerald green eyes staring, unblinking, at the floor numbers as they were illuminated, the curve of her perfectly formed breasts under her snow white blouse-
“My name is William!” He almost yelled. She whipped around, her hair flying, green eyes outlined black, wide in surprise.
“Hi,” she started. Her voice bubbled like champagne and wispy cigarette smoke in a dingy parlor, sweetness with a bitter edge, a dirty martini, something aged and jaded in the way her irises settled on him and bore right through him, like a ruthless predator as the cork popped and her lips formed his name, “William.”
A deer in headlights, he stopped, the elevator stopped, a sharp ring announcing their arrival. His mouth felt dry as it hung half open, words waiting to be said, to roll off the tip of his tongue suddenly caught again in the cage of his teeth.
Her stilettos clicked as she stepped off, giving him a playful, teasing look over her shoulder, “Goodbye, William.” The particular smoothness of her hips etched itself in his mind as she walked away. He stepped forward, hand reaching, then the elevator doors closed, sandwiching his hand, his injured finger, between two sheets of metal.
He spent ten more minutes in pain, mindlessly daydreaming of her. He didn’t even have her name.
According to the police report, three hours after his miraculous chance encounter in the elevator, William Frost, age twenty-nine, pitched himself out of his fifty-fourth floor office window.
PHYSICS LAB
I love him when I don’t see because I think I miss. I think I love sometimes and sometimes I’m not so sure and oh god, this movie, her little monologue out front. I’m dying in pain because I love and I doubt, I doubt that he loves, I don’t even think he gives a damn, or half as much as I do about him and I’m scared to ask and all that nice noise and I’m going tod ie and die and die and eventually I’ll tell him but I’m not sure when because I don’t want him to know that’s just so strange and I think I’ll end this sentence now.
I love him and I think I do. I think I do. I know I do, or not. I need, or maybe just want, do I need him? Can I say that out loud or will I die after I admit that little unimportant factoid that no one, not even myself, ever, ever, ever needs to know? What the hell am I supposed to do?!
Emo people make it hard to write lovesick poetry. And yes, I do write lovesick poetry because every once in a while I think of you, and then you aren’t there anymore, and that’s when the emotional discontent, as I’d like to call it, kicks in.
I hate everything, grades, life, him, you, that, and like, two pennies and a television.