Inheritance

I inherited her computer. I don't like computers. I don't get what is so exciting about them. I have a friend who is a computer programmer. I've seen programs that he wrote, the way he writes them. It's a confusion of symbols and half-words and numbers, typeset with a careful indentation, so it looks like a really bad poem that makes no sense at all. He tried to explain what was the logic behind it to me once. Poor Luke, it's not to wonder that he has no girlfriend.

I went to her apartment to get the computer. It was odd to go there without her, and think that she had killed herself in that place. But it was a notebook, easy to carry. She had written a long suicide note, probably trying to explain why she decided to drink poison, but to me it brought more questions than answers. She once told me she had a mind of her own, but she probably meant much more than the phrase seems to mean at first glance. I wonder how much of what she wrote in that letter is lost because we can't understand it.

But she wrote a short will. It stated that her computer should be given to me, as it was. She didn't have much more to give, the apartment was rented, she had no car, her clothes wouldn't fit me. I didn't know why she had left the computer to me when I first learned about her will; but when I turned it on I saw the small icon of a rose and my name under it, I did. I read her short note, which said I could do what I pleased with what I found in the computer.

I found about 100 pictures (of her and friends), 700 songs (downloaded) and thousands of pages of stories. Short stories, novels, poems, reviews of movies and books, her diary. I read them all. She was a good writer, a damn good one. I don't read much, I know. But there was so much that I almost couldn't believe she had written it all herself. She had published a few stories on the internet, I found later, under a nickname, but there was no indication that she had ever published anything in paper.

Of what she wrote, a good amount was unfinished. Sometimes only a few lines were written, sometimes a story developed for two hundred pages and was suddenly left unfinished, just like that, in the middle of a scene, sometimes an unfinished sentence. And I keep thinking to myself, how would she have finished the story? The characters are left there, waiting for the end of the story, and she will never write it. Maybe she would make Olivia and Earl get married and love each other for ever, which they deserve, but I am not sure of what she would make of Mina. I wonder if the hot scenes she wrote were not descriptions of her own sex, as they are sometimes remarkably similar to the quick suggestions in her diaries. Her boyfriends, maybe I could ask them. Maybe they could help me to finish these stories. Michael was a writer. I wonder if he knows about these texts, at least some of them; maybe they wrote part of them together, she on his lap, both naked and the one who was not typing fondling the other... Michale could help me to finish the stories, because I can barely sleep not knowing if Brian will finally fuck Carol in that unfinished novel.