I met Jules on a Tuesday, which already felt like a bad omen — Tuesdays are no one’s favorite. She blew into the community center art class like someone had dared her to be earnest for an hour and she was already losing the bet.
She had this presence about her. People like to say “you couldn’t look away,” but I tried to. I tried, and it didn’t work. She looked like a mistake you’d make twice. Tall, elegant in a way that suggested inherited ruin — like old wealth that had turned to drama instead of dust. Her eyes were honey lit by a distant fire. Everything about her said come closer — except the eyes, which said you’ll regret it.
She introduced herself like it was a confession. “I’m Jules,” she said. “I don’t finish things. But I’m great at starting.”
No one laughed, but I did. And that’s how it started.
We became inseparable the way chaos and calm sometimes braid themselves together out of sheer necessity. I was working a series of quietly disappointing jobs — one of those people with a planner full of color-coded dreams I never quite chased. Jules floated from gig to gig like she was dodging meaning. She called herself an artist, though I never saw the same piece twice. Everything she made either burned, was given away, or “felt wrong two days later.”
She was a poet when she was bored, a bartender when rent was due, a muse to a half-dozen sad boys who mistook damage for depth. And I? I orbited her. Not as a satellite, not exactly. Maybe more like a moth with a map, trying to convince herself she was going somewhere.
I told myself it was friendship. But there were nights I’d trace the shape of her name into the steamed glass of my bathroom mirror. Nights I’d watch her sleep on my couch — one arm flung dramatically over her forehead like a silent movie star — and wonder if I loved her, or if I just wanted to be her.
Jules had a theory that the best people were ruins. “You can’t trust someone fully assembled,” she’d say, painting her nails black and letting the varnish drip on my floor. “Where’s the poetry in that?”
She told stories like someone dared her to make you believe a lie — except every one of them held a kernel of truth you could taste like a pit in the fruit. A father who left. A mother who kept inviting chaos to dinner. A boy who said he’d love her forever and didn’t. A girl she kissed on a roof once and never called again. That last one she told only once, in a whisper, like it was a wound she wanted to name just enough to keep it alive.
And me? I listened. God, I listened like it was a profession. I wanted to memorize her — to catalog every chipped porcelain piece of her and maybe, just maybe, build something whole. She never asked me to. But I did it anyway.
We had our own mythology.
Thursday nights were ours — takeout and wine and her barefoot in my apartment, telling me what color the sky should have been that day if the world knew how to feel properly.
She once painted a portrait of me using only grays. “You’re too gentle for color,” she said. “You hold back. Even your brightness is cautious.”
I didn’t know whether to be flattered or destroyed. Maybe both.
The end didn’t come like thunder. It came like mist. A slow receding. A canceled plan here. A missed call there. Then three days without a text. Then a week. Then—
One day, I came home to find the painting gone. The one of me. She’d taken it back. No note. No goodbye. Just an empty hook on the wall and a silence loud enough to bruise.
I ran into her a year later. She was at a gallery showing someone else’s work, dressed like a question no one dared ask. She smiled like nothing had happened, and when I said her name — just her name — her eyes softened like I was the one familiar shape left in a room full of strangers.
“You always looked at me like I was worth something,” she said. “Even when I was falling apart on purpose.”
I wanted to say so many things. I wanted to scream, or kiss her, or list every way she wrecked me so beautifully I thanked her for it.
Instead, I just asked, “Did you ever finish the painting?”
She shook her head. “Didn’t feel right.”
Some people are buildings. Foundations. Brick and mortar and blueprints. They rise. They endure.
But some people? Some people are ruins by design. Cathedrals bombed by choice. Glorious in decay. Jules was that. A beautifully made failure. Every flaw curated. Every heartbreak handpicked.
And I? I was the girl who stayed too long in the museum, pressing my hand to the velvet rope, wondering what it would feel like to touch something forbidden.
She never asked to be saved.
And I never stopped loving her for it.
MADD FICTIONAL 