"Cut Short"

Where's Della?

You killed her.

Didn't you?

I knew her, we weren't close, but she was my only friend in New York. She and I are so different. Or maybe I'm too different from everyone else here. Who's to say.

Although, they do say you can find any Joe and Jane in this hotbed of ambition, talent, dreamers, and crazies. I guess that's not difficult to accept for anyone who has stood at the cross streets of 42nd Street and 6th Avenue for a day. There are the health fanatics working out at 7:30 in the a.m. in Bryant Park. Burpees, lunge squats, and spider crawls, oh my! All day, the streams of Park Avenue suits, Sixth Avenue fashionistas, Herald Square wannabe fashionistas, St. Mark's Place fringes, Flatiron Warby Parker-wearing hustlers to Kansas City scrunchy-haired tourists and bubblegum pink lipped South Korean trendsetters pass through this intersection weaving around the native homeless people who have staked out their square foot of pavement. Quite a time lapse of a demographic tapestry. Della said it used to be the case with the Tower Record shop downtown on Broadway and...something. 

Maybe I'm just extra different.

But I've digressed. 

Della. Yeah, Della was so full of life and spirit with a heavy dousing of imagination. She often told me she suspected you to be an assassin. Then one day she vanished. I found out when the police came questioning. I was stricken with nausea. I was defenseless against the shock and sadness by her suspected demise. They rendered me useless for months on end. 

New York isn't my home and Della was the only person I met that made an attempt to make this place a home. I'm from a town with a mostly mom and pop Main Street, except for the CVS on one of the eight streets' corners. The homes were mostly owned, mostly well-kept with respectable curbside appeal, and mostly lived by a Landen or Trippen (no, I kid you not) or an intermarriage of these two clans. 

Again, I've digressed. 

New York. This town can get one lonely. Not alone. Lonely. I wanted some excitement, a clear out from Main Street, USA so I came here. I made Della's acquaintance and things started to be nice. Then she disappeared. I missed her and I missed the thrill of having a friend with NYC as our stomping ground. So I posted an ad in the same place Della posted hers.

"Small town girl need board and food. Also wouldn't mind a relocation stipend too. In return, you get 5 hours of exceptional personal assistance work for your professional and personal needs, including good jokes, and a bocce game or two." 

I wanted to work for you. Fortunately, you bit.

After I started working for you, I too was sure you're an assassin. 

Every time I booked plane tickets for you I would look for news there about disappearances, accidents, from the freakish to the run-of-the-mill, always trying to guess which which deaths you meticulously crafted. I collected and saved any article I could find that reported on what are suspects of your handiwork. I catalogued them, cross-referenced them, analyzed them, and slowly I saw began to see, to extract, to define your style.

Every time I'm in the apartment I could feel you watching me. Not in a creepy, sexual predator kind of way, but in a trained, cautious, special ops surveillance kind of way.

UPDATE: Continuing offline  

Image credit:  Dicky Masdiyanto on Unsplash

_______________________________________

_______________________________________

---