#usersisha

My dearest Emmalina,

The first thing that you should know is that I’m not in love with her anymore.

Maybe I never loved her. Maybe I never stopped.

But the one thing that I’m certain of is that she was the only real thing in my life. The girl who had eyes that held galaxies and a smile that spoke of nuclear war.

Pippa’s eyes … God, her eyes. Two wide black moons. The promise of universes and everything that entailed scattered within, flecks of gold like fragments of stars. Do you see the stars or the darkness between them, Juju?

Pippa was the only one that ever got away with calling me “Juju.” - not even you, dear sister, had that privilege. She had only ever called me Jude twice—the first time that I kissed her, and the last. 

Our first kiss had smelled of Pippa’s floral perfume and turpentine and the oil paint smeared on my hands, colors that I thought I knew until that moment. My life had been black and white, charcoal on paper, until Pippa had painted it all in colors I’d never be able to see with anyone else.

Our last kiss had been colored by rain and tears. There was no buttery sunlight filtering in through studio windows, no giddy laughter or messy kissing or stumbling around in a drunken semblance of a waltz. Pippa kissed me once, hard, painted my mouth red with her lipstick. I had felt her tears hot on my cheeks. 

My heart broke, Lina. Maybe it was broken to begin with. You’d know. 

And then - and then she was gone. Phillipa Grey was a novelist, a ballerina, and a composer of paracosms and daydreams. She bled ink and breathed stories like I bleed oil paint and lies.

She knew damn well that I’d ruin myself a million little times to bring those moments—our tangled fingers, her breath in my ear, her dark dark eyes catching the lights and reflecting a thousand unseen stars.

I made her into a liar. I twisted the bright goodness in her into something—something else. Jude Watson was fucked in the head. Pretty Miss Grey didn’t need her and her champagne problems—did I even have them?

Pippa loved Degas, which was something that made me fall in love with her a little more—if that was even possible. You would expect a girl like my Pippa to love Kandinsky or perhaps Picasso, something colorful and abstract and almost musical in its organized chaos.

Pippa, my Pippa, she loved Degas’ ballerinas. She loved Monet’s landscapes, his brushstrokes, the way sunset orange blended with misty, cold-water blue.

I loved Pippa, past tense. I don’t love her anymore—maybe I never loved her at all. Maybe—maybe I never stopped.

I’m a fraud. 

But Pippa wasn’t. And I hate myself for roping her into this, for gaining her and losing her and loving her and everything in between.

I forge art. I step into the souls of painters long dead, making the architecture of my hands the architecture of their hands and coloring my heart with the colors of theirs. Yellow ochre. Raw umber. Vermillion green. Alizarin red. 

The trick isn’t in copying, Lina. It’s in emanating, in being. You needed confidence to paint a canvas in Monet’s style, to age the paint so it cracked, to make it seem like a painting that had been found after all this time.

My job was to paint pretty Degas ballerinas. Pippa had suggested it—Don’t do a Da Vinci, Juju. Mayhaps a Degas? She pronounced Degas with a perfect French accent, a musical lilt to her British one. A Degas would be easier to pass off.

I was mesmerized. Silky black hair—no, it was such a dark brown that it seemed black, like her eyes. Pippa was tall, but in heels she towered. She was gorgeous. She had the aura of a woman who was unafraid. Maybe Pippa really was.

But I was going to paint the ‘Degas.’ Pippa was going to play the part of a passionate finder and sell it to a museum or a collector. If it went well, we’d do it again.

Neither of us expected to fall in love. Me with beautiful, untouchable, enchanting Phillipa Grey. Pippa with Judith Watson and her paint-splattered hands, a creator of art forgery and perfectly spun lies.

Pippa was never one of them.

But neither of us expected for it all to go perfectly, inevitably, unfixably wrong.

                                                                                               Your loving sister,