Disclaimer: Don't own them. Get over it.

Notes: I have, however, taken quite a bit of artistic license with one of the characters. Bet you can't guess which one!

For Roger. You know why.

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Musetta's Waltz.

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An opera student. A fucking opera student.

Anything would have been better than an 'opera student'. And the way she said it was so passive and nonchalant. Like it shouldn't bother me that my girlfriend likes all that stupid standing up straight and screeching "music" that makes me want to kill myself.

I wanted to smack her.

And then.. then she made me listen to it.

I could have killed her.

Someone like her has no business being an opera student. I don't care how far in the past it is now. I don't care that she "got over it" which, for her, means that she fucked it up.

Opera.

Fucking OPERA.

It's an outrage! Rock stars do not date stuffy opera bitches. It's unheard of!

And stupid.

And, even stupider, she made me learn it. The bitch made me play her stupid upper-middle class, very un-bohemian CRAP on my baby. My guitar. My precious guitar has been tainted!
It will never be the same.

She even tried to pick out a name. As if I'd ever let someone else name my baby. That's too stupid to even think about.

And you wanna know what's even worse? She's actually good. I mean, It would be alright if she sucked and then I could just make fun of her, but she's really good. She can hit some pretty amazing notes. It's so pretty.

It's actually kind of fun to play for her. I play and she sings. Sometimes she sings opera,
but mostly she hits the notes that I don't feel like hitting when we're just singing rock. Not that I couldn't hit them if I wanted to. But sometimes I just don't feel like it, you know?

You wouldn't guess it by looking at her, but she has this really pretty, soft singing voice.
Most people probably think she sounds like Janis Joplin, but it's so pretty. Almost like wind. Like she's always singing a lullaby, no matter what it is. Soft, but strong.

I guess she's kind of like that too. I don't think anyone really knows what a sweet girl she is underneath the cakey eyeliner and drunken fights and track marks. But that's her for you. She's not at all like you'd expect. She's.. I don't know.

She's a pretty lie.

Once you get used to something about her, it's like she senses that you're okay with it so she goes out of her way to change it - just to make you squirm.

I love that about her.

She gets off on making people mad.

I think that's why she started singing that stupid opera shit around me so much after she told me. Because she knew it bugged the shit out of me and she thought it was funny. And she thought it was even funnier that I couldn't play the songs right. She say I do it on purpose to piss her off, and I let her think that. Because I'd rather have her think that I'm a dick than admit that there are some things I can't play properly.

She reminds me of the characters in operas.

They always had something tragic going on, but they managed to turn these terrible and hopeless situations into beautiful songs. The best areas, or arias or whatever the fuck they are, are the ones where the girls kill themselves because the love of their life is gonna marry someone else, or their husband got killed in a war or something. Because they're always so beautiful and so full of life until the last second before they die.

Speaking of which, I suppose I should have been using past tense this whole time. I really need to start doing that more often. I keep forgetting that she's not just in the next room anymore.

She's dead.

Her favorite opera was La Boheme. I never forgot that one because the song that she sang all the fucking time was from La Boheme.

I feel like such a dick. I never told her a lot of really important things.

So I did what I could after she died to make it up to her.

I wanted to name my guitar 'April' after her, but I know she thinks - thought - naming a guitar or a car after a girlfriend is bad luck and stupid; so I named her Musetta because that was what she hadtried to get me to name her for months.

I hate that the entire time she was alive, April thought that I hated the only thing she'd ever been passionate about.

What I never got the chance to tell her was that I only pretended to hate it so she'dnever stopsinging it.