Word Count : 802
My dearest Holly Golightly,
I write this to you now, sitting in the lonesome apartment below yours; listening to your late return on a
Wednesday night: the swinging door, your trudging, stumbling steps across your barely decorated apartment ( if
you count the half of a bathtub as furniture ). In precisely 7 hours, a ‘weather report’ is due - it will forever amaze
me how you so delicately confessed you carried coded messages for a drug dealer in Sing Sing. Just another hoax.
I’ve been most curious about you, my love, what does it mean to be Holly Golightly? Is it the sickly
charming personality of this enchantress you have invented? What is it? But, the real question, I suppose is, does it
matter? You were tricking all the right people, the right men. I wonder if those who embellish you with their gifts
and “powder room charges'', were watching you closely enough to notice that the goddess Holly Golightly is not
real. She never has been. Question yourself, whether it had ever crossed their numb minds that you were simply
fitting into the uniform of their desires, if they had ever considered your feelings when you were pursuing them for
a few extra fifties.
Or was the world truly so cruel to you Holly? Could life possibly manufacture you into the most perfect
little vixen? New York’s very own Medusa turning men into stone while bleeding their pockets dry; or I wonder,
whether the soul of a girl like you was stone itself, born rigid and cold, to never be broken. A meticulously planned
femme fatale, or an alluring siren, casting love spells you had all bewitched by. A beautiful death trap.
What is it that makes you so damn perfect? Was it the music in your laughter; the poetry in your words?
Was it the way you ignored me, built the ivory walls of your heart to stop my restless attempts? And despite it all, all
the using, all the lying, all the manipulating; I still love you. And you could never know how much it kills me. You
were clever enough to make me so foolishly believe that you needed me. Those few moments in your apartment,
where the facade of you faded were enough for me to be completely, utterly and irrevocably infatuated with you.
Do you remember the moment I fell in love with you? Embarrassingly, it was the first time we met - me,
you, and a cat - has been seared into my mind. This lonely apartment complex, on this lonely street; in our lonely
city with a lovely, frightened girl and a nameless cat. And now, me. Now forever a flashbulb memory that will
appear before my eyes when I die. Guess I’ll go with a smile…
Have you decided on a name yet? That little cat, the poor slob with no name, as you so graciously called
him. Why hadn’t you claimed him with a name yet? I laugh at my own thoughts now, only just realising how
pathetic you must have thought I was. Then, you simply smiled in your dazed, sleepy state, getting lost in a
philosophy that only a particular type of girl would ever find herself in.
Ownership. Belonging. Possession.
You don’t own the cat, right? You may love him but he isn’t yours. After meeting - well, becoming
captivated by you - I pondered over your words for what felt like aeons; revisiting every sentence that came from
your mouth as if it were the unedited words of God, analysing, dissecting and interpreting them in every way I
could, desperately attempting to understand. I figured in those moments where your sullen vulnerability and desire
to belong to someone would infiltrate the barriers of self-assuredness you had built, it was enough to make you
want it; to be someone’s. To be mine.
But for now I know, instead, we will remain here, a wandering girl who has captured and held hostage the
heart of a lost boy. We will remain in a lifetime where you can only ever love yourself, and I will wait. Cursed to
wake every morning without you, savouring the moment of time, a small gap between the peace of the night and the
chaos of the day, briefly dreaming of your face; your harmonious laughter; your honeyed, venomous words,
replaying it all before it fades into the havoc of the days. Every. Single. Morning.
