The Bluestocking 2023-24

Juliane Guo Grade 12 Death is the end of love.

Sally knows this as a fact. When death comes and separates two people in love, it replaces the swirling passion and pink skies with grief, sadness, hatred, a tinge of unexplainable numbness, and eventually acceptance. Soon the other person’s face would be blurred in one’s memory, their smile faded like a sun-baked photograph, their name reduced to a familiar chime to the ears. Mar hasn’t been in Sally’s life for six months. Her witty sarcasm and ill-timed jokes, occasional impulse of jokingly ordering six shots of espressos in a big cup and nothing else at the café, late-night philosophies accompanying lofi-hip-hop music in the kitchen at 3 a.m., all reduced into a snapshot of who she was, taken in a split second. A short-statured figure wearing a ruby red coat, dyed-gray ginger hair peeking out from below a hood, lips curving up to the camera like a half-smile. Flattened into a simple background of the red-coated figure’s photo were classrooms at morning time, the coffee shop down the street, long bus rides through the city. Conveniently, Sally moved away, leaving any possible retrieval signals of memories far behind her. Sally used to keep Mar’s photo on her table, a time when she would stop and stare at Mar’s face once in a while, her own vision often blurred by tears. When the ice melted in Spring, she took Mar’s photo with her on long walks in the park, straddling through mud mixed with cherry blossom petals and rainwater. She would close her eyes and smell the flowers, and pretend Mar was next to her, doing the same. In summer she wrote letters addressed to no one, then made paper airplanes out of them and tossed them into the sea. Then she 35 Everything has an end.