Pretty Dead Girls

In eleventh grade, there was a new girl in my school. She came from the West Coast, landed in close-to-somewhere-but-really-nowhere New Jersey, and looked straight punk with the eyeliner to match. I thought I was hard because I had cut the bubblegum shit a year ago and listened to "Ready to Die" while trig-ing my way through Intro to BC. She was probably looking for the other punk kids at school because there’s always a crew and they’re always “the best people you will ever meet” until you realize Asianized New Jersey is very different from the West Coast or anything in the movies (i.e. no punk kids). When we were both stuck friendless in gym class, I was bland as chewed gum and she’d already convinced everyone she was too cool to talk. It would have been a perfect setup for a lesbian movie (think "Foxfire"), but in real life, the unattached one, me, was straight; the queer one, she, had a steady boyfriend; and everyone was too busy to get seduced.

Before I was in love with Toni Morrison, I was in love with this one phrase everyone associates with her, her style, her characters, her plots, her thinking: dangerous. No. Not just dangerous. Dangerously free. As in can’t be contained, as in dying young, as in nothing to lose. I think I had an idea of what “dangerously free” would look like, and it always involved this raw, breathless, windswept intensity that could only be described as tragically beautiful. Like getting so skinny from meth you could drum your ribs like a guitar. Like laughing, but not because it’s funny. Like cigarette smoke and the skin beneath your knee. I was thinking about a girl, bound by no one, nowhere, nothing but her body; a girl so broken that norms don’t matter; a girl, from no place, going nowhere. It all seemed like straight poetry.

The new girl? I wasn’t sure if she fit that description,—the dangerously free one—but in eleventh grade, she was the closest I’d ever been to it. She was the first person I’d met who’d been to rehab. Her father was in jail, and she wouldn’t tell me why. She’d moved more than five times. She kissed girls and boys. She said she’d once been suicidal, depressed. I’d seen both before, suicidal and depressed, but she managed to become them, to do them in a way that wasn’t corny as hell. And she was leaving next year, she told me, going for good, off to her boyfriend’s farm with two fluffy dogs.

Females are more likely to be depressed than males. Females may be more chemically predisposed to depression. Or maybe, females live in a world structured to drive them crazy. Maybe, females are placed in a world made for males. And who can function when she’s living for someone else?

Or maybe, depressed is how females are more likely to imagine themselves.

In poetry, there is nothing like a beautiful dead girl, like Annabel Lee who loved with a love that was more than love, or Juliet who is the fair sun that kills the envious moon, or Dorcas for whom Joe Trace will never stop crying because she’s dead and forever dangerous, forever beautiful.

But if death is hard to commit to, the second best option is when she’s almost there, dead in the head. In "Girl, Interrupted," the movie version, Angelina Jolie’s character pleads for Wynona Rider’s character to hurt her, and she is so fragile, so volatile, so intensely interesting, because she can control everyone around her, make everyone else’s existence so painful and raw—but she can’t hurt herself. Sula shrugs her shoulders after sleeping with Nel’s husband. Dewey Dell, even if she’s scared, is a “wet seed wild in the hot blind earth,” on the tipped point of sanity. Norms don’t matter because these girls are irreversibly, darkly broken. You can’t fix them, just like you can’t tell a starving child to mind his manners. They’re unserious with the real world, because what matters, what limits them, is deep. Something you wouldn’t understand even if you tried.

To be dangerously free is to use the smoke and clatter and dance of the world to free you from yourself. It would be easy, even safe, to say that this obsession with pretty dead girls, beautiful depression, femininity, is all socially constructed because of patriarchal society and violence against women and the white male gaze and “this is why we need feminism!!!”—which I would buy if I thought the issue was simple. If I didn’t find myself being so, so complicit. But even if you asked me to tell a story, my pretty 15 pages would be about a sad, gendered body.

Is it objectification to write about a broken body in place of a broken heart? And when you gleefully, enthusiastically, happily, lovingly objectify yourself, even in something as stupid as a story, because it works and because it makes sense, where does that leave you? I want to know what happens when pain is so pretty that without it you’d be normal. I want to know if there’s a place where pain stops hurting, or maybe, where it still hurts the same but you just don’t care because it feels so right.

There were times, when I showed her writing and she showed me drawings, that I thought I could have been wild too. It was just that I was smart first/too Asian for my parents to let me out of the house after 6 p.m., let alone survive a painkiller addiction/too non-confrontational to sneak out/planning to go to college/too content and emotionally stable/living in my head/aiming, in general, to live old rather than die young. I didn’t want to lose. Which made me the opposite of wild. But in those moments, I just wanted to be intoxicating.

She walked into gym class with her arm sleeved up in pen patterns so intricately done it seemed to be a waste that they were temporary. Once our gym teacher was absent so we hung out in the health classroom and she pressed a pen to my arm but I told her not to because my parents would kill me and she called me a square.

What is so interesting about the way a square crumples into a ball? Is it fetishization, the way we mourn suicide, the way we claim martyrs and virgins? Or is it natural, like how communal animals always take care of the weakest, like how we love stories that make us feel things? Are there no alternatives?

Someone once told me that depression was addicting. That once you were in it, you felt parts of yourself you never knew existed ache, and when you were out they stopped existing. You wanted them back. I asked her about that, and she glared at me. Then she told me she would never ever want to feel the way she did again. So I trusted her.

Later in the year, a boy in my English class walked in with insanely detailed drawings on his left arm. She’d signed it. Night purple lipstick stuck pretty on his skin and outlined in pen. I was surprised that I was so surprised. She, like me, knew other people, flirted, had a life, and I knew that. But I guess everyone wants to save a pretty girl. Everyone wants to know her. Everyone wants to own a part of her dark, twisted-up world.

Christina M. Qiu '19 lives in Matthews Hall. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.