Her lips always left a cherry stain on teacups- she had more red lipstick than food in the cupboards. Her hair was a coffee brown at the time, tied back loosely around a clip, which made her blue eyes pop. I liked the way she looked. She was the girl in the French movies. A record player scratching on repeat. I remember she enjoyed the piano- how she tickled the keys and made them laugh. Even though she was tone deaf, she loved to hear herself sing and was convinced other people did too. Sometimes she would rearrange the apartment and sing loudly in the street and make strangers angry and rip apart the pillows and tear pages out of books- just to dance in the mess. She never went anywhere without insisting that I photograph her using her polaroid, so she could see the photo instantly. She didn’t like the way she looked. I remember she had this way with her cursive letter L’s- they were kind of loopy and squiggly just like her. Every spring, farmers market peonies would line her dusty windowsills and catch all the light. After a day of basking in their beauty, she would slice off the petals and burn the remaining stems- one time she lit her eyelashes too. She always had this thing with scissors and a match, with the destruction of beauty. I guess that’s how it ended too.