I’ll tell you about how I’ve been remembering myself in the silver crucifixes and imaginary cracks of light underneath a centuries-old door frame. About how I find smudges of my soul on everything I touch, bones, dirt, the paper-thin resolve in my hands. It’s dark, you know. The light isn’t really there, only a sprout of hope I continue to nourish. You would think that in Hell it would be bright, flaming—but it’s not, you know. It’s all darkness down here.

The Paris catacombs stretch out beneath all semblance of sunlight and sleep. A network of tunnels and passageways, birthed from an overcrowding of cemeteries. Twist like a serpent, cross the gates of Hell and—ARRÊTE: C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT.

Stop: here lies the Empire of Death. Bones decorate the walls like a macabre art gallery. Within the frigid, mosslike clutches of the underground, I continue to worship every gust of stale air that reminds me of the last breath I had the luxury of breathing. It was a glorious breath, too. Now, I spend my days digging through the emptiness while passing tourists leave me little bits of overcooked wisdom to hold on to. Tourists looking into the porthole of my no-longer-existence like curious children with their noses glued to glass. L’Amour est un oiseau rebelle / Que nul peut apprivoiser / Et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle / S’il lui convient de refuser.

I knew this all already, of course. A ghost still has memory.

When you stumble, you can’t hold on to the walls—the remains, I mean. Little difference from real life, when you think about it. I err and stray in this fortress of dried-up bones, bodies melted off like the colorful meat of candlewax and all that’s left is the inevitable scalding. Nothing there to catch your fall but pain bursting out in every direction as you try to grasp at something, anything, pieces of a forever so far away.

A month ago, I used my last breath to sing a song. Rien n’y fait, menace ou prière / L’un parle bien, l’autre se tait / Et c’est l’autre que je préfère / Il n’a rien dit mais il me plait. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but Carmen’s debut would be my finale.

At the opera house, every detail that makes humanity magnificent dares to surface, told in vulnerable cries or bluebird feathers or voices rising to the heavens. Evenings braided from a dream, a long, stretched dream, velvet curtain falling behind me like a sanguine nosebleed. Among the audience—the bodies of two thousand aristocrats’ hearts, more stone than flesh.

“You know a lot about crashing, do you not, darling Gabrielle? How do you do it?”

Théodore Beaufort held his entire body weight on his tip-toes with binoculars pressed against the tender skin, tender target holes of his eyes. He was the kind of gentleman who was consistently in vibration, hopping closer in earnest as he brandished his queries at me like knives. He was sharper than he appeared to be, I knew, with his trench coat falling off his shoulders like ruffled feathers. “How do you position your body just right to where the damage does none?” he questioned. I couldn't tell if his tone was mocking or exceedingly passionate. Pleading, almost.

A step forward, tongue eager. “And, if I may inquire further”—Théodore leapt down the carpeted stairs to the bottom of the stage, head level with my feet that I could easily kick— “how do you think your thoughts just so, make them cease, in all possible abruptness, to hurt?”

Body tucked smoothly into the embrace of a crinoline, my dainty slippers brought a dusty pink blush to the hardwood of the stage. I smiled down at him, heels remaining well-mannered, anchored to the ground. Palpable differences and shared complications battled amongst themselves in the space between us.

“You overestimate my abilities, Monsieur Beaufort,” I replied. “I crash—I careen—I hurt, but hopelessness is the very catalyst for my consistency. Even in what seems like a horrible, soaking, tragic eternity, my placidity—sheer elegance, I won’t succumb to modesty—is merely a silver lining trimmed to prevent my boiling brain from floating far away.”

The insanity of the arts was too much for some, it would seem. Théodore sank back into his seat, face bathed in smoldered ash. Binoculars lowered, tender eye holes exposed.

His limited field of vision was scared of me, though he'd never show it. Choice of language sowed by my own affliction and thereby tilled to my desperation’s desire—he was not the only one with a pained mind. Splendor to dust, collect dust from splendor.

Songbird chest trembling, virtue of a troubled treble, I began to sing. L’Amour est enfant de Bohême / Il n’a jamais connu de loi / Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime / Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi!

With a starry-eyed stare and his scandalized mouth agape, Théodore’s shrill voice broke through the bustle of intermission. Desperate, as we all were, to make amends for sins long past. I heard nothing but the chorus on repeat within my skull:

L’Amour! L’Amour! L’Amour!

My lips in oval ecstasy as they, smitten by blame, formed the two-syllable word. I was a prima donna, I could not love anything except the melodies. I had to detest my interior so the exterior could be spectacular, that was my fall from grace. But that was before.

“Until my dying breath, Théodore,” I said, throat burning from an emotion not unlike pride, “I will love where love is lacking.”
“I know you can still hear me, even when the song you sing takes your soul away.”

Threatening, almost. “Takes my soul away? You say that in a way that implies it was my fault. Like you weren't the one that took it—my ambitious youth thrown at your mercy and what do I get in return? A treasonous brain gone rotten.” I gesticulated as if to say, look at this mess of a creature I've become, decked out in lace and feigned poise and feathers. “Your face is a culmination of plagued centuries, steeped in humanity's crimes and its worst foes. A conglomeration of thoughts not truly yours, never meant to be yours, muddled in emotions you can't separate from the truth.”

I had lost my virtue to rapacious famine, a feeling that squeezed muscle and dissolved itself through skin. It was well known that avaricious eyes gazed only at mistakes, not simply due to lack of food, but lack of love. “Until my dying breath”—fire scorching through my palate and out toward his uncertain figure—“no matter what you may say.”

L’Amour! L’Amour! L’Amour!

“But you force your teeth to clash together,” Théodore called out in response, his dark cane thumping the ground energetically, “enamel on enamel so that relief cannot come, even through bleeding.” A treacherous accusation, but I was my own enemy and had to own up to it, turn myself in to whatever authorities presided over such deprecation.

Si tu ne m’aimes pas, si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime…

“Truth that bends so easily,” Théodore returned, flashing a wry smile, “that shifts underneath its own weight and waits for you—digs its claws into your head, drains away every scrap of self-love that you've fought tooth and nail for, over and over again.”

I remembered two hands frostbitten by a violent winter. Window slapping itself open, snow fluttering in uninvited along with my piled-up guilt for letting the house become so cold. A small body unable to keep still, shuddering against the noonday glimmer. I had longed to make hot tea roll through her intestines, coax every tissue towards peace, gently. I couldn’t, at the time. This was why I sang.

L'oiseau que tu croyais surprendre / Battit de l'aile et s'envola / L'amour est loin, tu peux l'attendre / Tu ne l'attends plus, il est là.

It was such a delicate calm. Fragile, silent, that night. Like the Christmas hymn just before the rejoicing. The little girl had her skin painted blue the next morning, my old self. I said it must be so she can be part of the sky. She, on the other hand, insisted that she preferred to go to sleep within the depths of my eyes, to be secure yet without responsibility. By the following afternoon, her wish was granted—blue, sleep, making sweet noise in the back of my throat for the rest of eternity. This was why I sang.

L’Amour! L’Amour! L’Amour!

“Starvation wasn't the sole option at your disposal, dearest Gabrielle. You could have warmed your heart in a home of your own keeping. You could have made yourself a family. Still, you chose me instead. The horseman of famine himself, how did you think I'd feed you?”

Théodore released an unabashed laugh from the prison of his thoracic cage. He, in his gloomy waistcoat and tophat, thought that he was funny. My vocal chords disagreed heartily.

I had been aching with growth and all I wanted was to be above everything else. Starve my romantic spirit and sing my life away. I wanted to be the sun, constant, empirical, admired. When a relative asked me why, I understood that the role of the arts in the whole of society was that of a tree which forgets its roots. Of a human forgetting how to show their humanity, and trying with all their might to rediscover it. Grab it, preserve it. My arms extended, reaching out.

The tree branch cracked, the bird lost her footing, I snapped. “Don’t you dare look at me as if you’re the good one.” The music stopped. “Your cowardice leads to direct starvation—murder, not even second degree, but of the most intimate kind. Your nature forces you to light a match and watch with utmost interest as the house catches fire. You stand aside, hold your innocence firmly as you keep a safe distance. Murderer turned spectator.”

In truth, Théodore hadn't killed that girl. But he also did nothing to stop me.

“Yes, yes! A safe distance, unlike you, towering over your past on a worthless pedestal.”
Théodore’s frustration foamed over the lid of his conscience, rabies-like. “I pulled ashes from your jaws, every useless love you tried to swallow. Even if my eyes fail me, I know exactly who you say you are after the curtain falls, after the collapsing.”

To that, I threw back a retort, a molten coal for him to catch: “To break a dream is to mutilate a soul, you know.”

Eyebrow raised, posture straightened. He caught it. We always tend to criticize that which most resembles ourselves.

“And what dream,” he drawled through sandpaper lips, “have you mutilated?” Confidence returned to the empty holes of his eyes where his soul should have been.

Deep breath, I gulped a breath full of life. “Everything I wish I knew meets me at a cliff in my mind. I’m full of wanting, yes, standing at the edge of myself, looking down into a sea of songs and piercing octaves and rose petals thrown at my feet, then discarded to shrivel up right after.” Deep breath, I exhale all of history. “What’s the point? A dream of effortless loving without any work on my end—the impossibility of it all, that was my mistake. Now I must move on.” A pause, followed by a leap. “What’s yours?”

I received no response. My eyes traveled fretfully down to my feet, the edge of the stage. Théodore had disappeared, nothing but a cloud of smoke from the pipe that he had nursed so lovingly. A flicker, lights turned off and I was alone. Shadowless, even.

With a flourish of violins and a blush licking at my cheekbones, the opera in my mind came to a close. See, we weren’t in an opera house. I wasn’t standing on a stage.

Théodore won, grabbed his entire musical production. Gained a perverse happiness, thief in the many passing nights. I was gone, flew away with the wretched bluebirds flitting about in the rafters—creatures that he insisted upon shooting down with his pistol under the pretense of mind-numbing distraction.

Bang. I was a bird, singing, flapping around for years until that one shot. Destroyed. Brain malfunctioning—he thought that I was them, and they were me.

It’s dark, you know. The music isn’t really there, just a figment of my memory that I continue to nourish. The birds aren't real, either, and to hallucinate wings without the ability to alter gravity is a dangerous thing. Two sources of insanity cause exponential growth, and we were no exception.

My head is an offset circus act, ears ringing and I crack at my own hypocrisy. Tonight, I'll finally go to bed. I write my eulogy before I can forget—a sob story—because I could be lying without realizing. I wish I had forsaken my dream, I mistake hollowness for my heart beating itself into the skulls that collect like picture frames on the walls, fortress of bones and, consequently, of memories. Soul dissipating, dripping into the hardwood, the metal railings alongside the rows of two thousand seats, the overstuffed cushions that he once touched. How am I supposed to fill a half-empty glass?

Once this fear has died, I’m not sure how I will define love. That’s my own fault, anyway. I feel I lost my heart a little, had it pierced by the bullet from Théodore’s pistol when my bluebird feathers were torn away. I wish for the ground of death to be wet so that I'll leave footprints and everyone will know not to follow me. Through the slipping of the night, I liquefy in order to shade myself from the moon.

Deep within the catacombs, the sky tumbles upon me in caking dust instead of raindrops—generous helpings of it, while in this heavy downpour I’m cleansed and humbled, linked by the earth-given stream to an infinite somnolence. Dust to splendor, finally free.

I sink into the dirt until my lungs clench, halves of a crucifix glinting from the shadows like two broken wings pieced together beneath collapsed support beams. I hope the tourists are still breathing, at least, somewhere among the rocks and bones and rubble, the fallen souls. They deserve to. Seasons drift by and we keep breathing. Soon enough, someone is going to be sued for this—I don’t doubt it, but until then all I can do is gasp until I have no remembrance of breath, cursed song, cursed breath.

Bluebirds are supposed to be harbingers of happiness. My eyelids droop, slowly.

For the world to miss me, I must decay. You'll do better than I did, won't you?

May 12, 2024

About the writer

Stefanie Lee is an ambitious young writer from Montréal, Canada. Living with a rare physical disability called Nemaline Myopathy, she is a motivated student who will be studying Software Engineering as of Fall 2024. Her poetry appears in Willawaw Journal and Medmic, and is forthcoming in Quarterly Journal. A short story of hers is featured in Bright Flash Literary Review.