“Dirty Diana”

My dear,

I hope you are OK. In fact, I know you are. Ever since you killed me, a massive boulder has toppled off your selfish shoulders. I’m not going to ask why you murdered me. I am already fully aware. But I am curious as to what you were thinking.

Murder is such an ugly thing. It’s as black as a board with no purifying chalk. My dear. That I address you as this is not an attempt on my part to be endearing. We were never in a relationship. We were never married. Hell, we didn’t even fuck. We came close though, when you unbuckled my belt and squeezed my erection as if it was a stress-ball. Luckily, we had to stop whatever we were doing because your old man came back home, and if he saw me fiddling with his precious little princess, he would have squeezed my dick too. But not in that lovely way you were. He would have squeezed it in a way in which it would never be squeezable ever again.

I am calling you ‘my dear’ because sitting here in heaven, I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for your brazen attitude, your sick mentality which compelled you to pick that knife up and drench its blade with every drop of blood in my body. And why? Because you thought I was cheating? You thought I was being a male slut? Or was it because you were cheating and you were ashamed of yourself so much that you felt the need to slaughter me, to save me from the pain? That last option, I highly doubt. Your narcissistic cackle from the time you slammed my fingers in the drawer, your cruel smile which lit up your sunken face when you flushed my dead mam’s ring right in front of me. All of it still haunts my senses. And I’m dead.

I sometimes think that you killed me because you just felt like it. Let me see what it feels like to kill a 16-year-old child, you must have thought. I can picture it as if I were still alive. Coming home from school to find you waiting for me. My Pa weren’t home. I rattled the key in the lock, which was unusually stiffer to turn. I have my doubts as to whether you did something to it. Starting the game, I suppose. Hoping to make the adolescent hairs on my neck rise? Am I winning, my dear?

I entered, dropped my bag on the kitchen floor. The pan wasn’t even on. Hell, it was just minding its own business in the cupboard. Somehow though, I still felt as if I was burned with blisters when I saw you. Menacingly sitting on the table, knife in hand, my A-graded Maths test creasing in your clenched fist.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, knowing how foolishly cliché that question was. There was no time for me to be original though. You sauntered over, a devilish sparkle exploding in your hazel eyes. I wish it didn’t, but the aroma of your scented caramel hair wrapped itself around my nose. Perhaps God who I’m sitting next to, as I’m writing this, wanted me to have a final whiff of your beauty before the madness which lurked behind it revealed itself in its ugliest form. How can you do this, my dear? We were sixteen! Children. Little kids. How can you pick up a knife and…well, I suppose I’ve already said all the proposed reasons. Jealousy. Power. I’m telling you, my dear. If Mrs Carlton from English read this letter, she’d be mad at all my teetering exposition. I must be concise. You’ll just scrunch this up, otherwise.

Even though I had already gone to heaven by this point, Pa were sobbing as my body was laid to rest. Your parents weren’t there. They were sobbing too, but at the idea of having a teenage daughter in prison for murder. You got life, my dear. But at least you’ve still got life.

Pleaded guilty, you did. But not out of genuine remorse. A snigger crossed your lips as you answered the judge with your plea. You wanted people to know. As a badge of honour. To think I fell in love with you. My plan was to ask you out after we finished messing, that day your dad arrived. But either nothing goes to plan, or everything goes to plan. In the end, nothing always wins, my dear. You are surrounded by nothing in your cell, save for a small television, grey outfits and too many toilet rolls. I can see you now. That demented princess has disappeared. She’s been engulfed by this delusional prisoner. Those decorous legs have been covered with greyness; those caramel locks have been replaced with stringy, greasy hair on a 17-year-old’s head. And I swear, those juicy breasts, which always made me get it up, have turned into sour, mouldy old grapes, rotting away on your chest.

But I admire you, my dear. I really do. You just get on with it. Even though, despite the endless good health of heaven, I feel sick. I feel like my waterfall of vomit could spill all the way down to my grave when I look at you, without a care in the world, marching over to the exercise yard, getting into scraps with other convicts and enjoying all of that, with a grin wider than the day you flushed my mam’s ring. While other young women your age are dating, clubbing and growing, instead of growing in an interesting lecture hall, an energetic city or a driving school which sees people leave with roads of independence ahead of them, you are shrinking in a dusty prison cell, yet you cannot fathom what this is doing to you. You cannot see it.

Heaven’s not all that bad, you know my dear? Everyone here has their own experiences. Its existence is debatable, so I’m not going to describe it. You don’t even believe in it. But I have one grouse against it. Heaven is my home. But this isn’t some leaky tap or dodgy boiler. My grouse is that heaven promotes love. Everyone here lives in a peaceful tranquillity, like nobody can touch them. Everyone loves. You wouldn’t believe it, my dear. One of the few good things I can remember which we both shared together was our love for Michael Jackson songs, particularly the one with your namesake. I met Michael the other day. He was everything I imagined. That high-pitched, sing-song voice, that affable smile, those deep, telling eyes. He sung a few songs for me which promoted love but strangely, instead of enjoying them, I wanted to shout at him to shut up. Because love is what I felt about you, my dear. Love is what stopped me from stopping you. Love protected me from protecting myself. That’s why you’re there now. My love pushed you into a world of hate.

I wish I could tell you, my dear. I wish I could talk to you. I wish to tell you that bad people are not bad people. You are not a bad person. You have only badness within you. And good people are not good people. They have good qualities, but human beings are human beings. You are a human being. I know you can also have good qualities, my dear.

I’m just sorry I didn’t find them.

I’m sorry it ended this way.

My good unleashed your bad.