How To Be ‘Helena’ If She Lived Long Enough To Start Smoking Cloves

By Lara Kramer  •  02 Jul 2025 in Features

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There’s crying in the shower, and then there’s orchestrating your breakdown so precisely it feels like it was directed by Sofia Coppola if she had a deathrock phase.

We’re talking Helena. We’re talking 2005 theatrical mourning couture, but make it sentient. This isn’t about being emo. It’s about being consecrated by emo, beatified by eyeliner and grief.

You don’t wear black. You embody it. A funeral procession set to a 6/8 time signature. A ballet for the damned, if they had Tumblr accounts and a working knowledge of Catholic iconography.

Here’s how to become the kind of presence that makes birds fall out of the sky.

1. Dress Widow-Core With A Cause

You don’t wear outfits, you wear revenge epilogues. Think Victorian child ghost who smokes clove cigarettes and quotes Sylvia Plath incorrectly, but on purpose. Layer corsetry over band tees with the sleeves cut off. Silk gloves at convenience stores. Heels with blood on the sole (yours or someone else’s, irrelevant). Everything should either look stolen, rotting, or unwashed since the ‘Three Cheers’ tour.

Also, please. Avoid looking “vintage.” The key is like you inherited your wardrobe from someone who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 2006.

2. Curate Your Grief Like It’s A Room Installation

You don’t cry. You art direct your sorrow. Place single dried roses in empty wine bottles on your nightstand. Leave handwritten letters in public bathrooms addressed to no one. Only journal on receipt paper or the backs of church bulletins. Burn incense not because you believe in it, but because the smell reminds you of your friend’s mother who died in 2011.

Casually refer to your bedroom as “the mausoleum.” Never explain.

3. Weaponise Slowness

Walk like you’re carrying the sins of your ancestors in a velvet clutch. Speak in a low tone that makes people lean in, then punish them for listening. Take exactly seven seconds to blink. Drink water like you’re tasting the memory of a dream. Never run for anything, unless it’s dramatic.

If someone tells you to hurry, say “Time is a circle and I already died once,” then look out the window like you’re waiting for your past life to text you back.

4. Perform Selective Delusion With Academic Rigour

Act like you wrote ‘Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge’ and the band just plagiarised you. Refer to Gerard Way as “the last honest frontman before the simulation rebooted.”
When asked about your hobbies, say “Funeral etiquette and comparative literature.”

Own at least one textbook about postmodernism that you never finish but quote constantly. Think “Catholicism meets Brechtian theatre” but filtered through a karaoke mic and broadcast to a basement full of ex-gifted kids.

5. Get Sick On Purpose

Romanticise your seasonal allergies. Speak lovingly of your recurring tonsillitis. Make your cough sound poetic. When your nose bleeds, thank it. Drink black coffee despite your heart murmur and call it “devotion.” If someone hands you Panadol, pretend you’re offended. Bonus points if you’re actually offended.

Bonus bonus points if you refer to your flu as “a personal reckoning.”

6. Haunt Public Spaces Like An Elegant Poltergeist

Sit at the back of the bus with opera gloves on. Lie down in abandoned car parks with headphones blasting live bootlegs from 2004. Write quotes from I Brought You My Bullets on steamed-up train windows. Make eye contact with CCTV. Leave pressed flowers on ATM machines. Vanish from group chats with the precision of a divine act.

When you walk into a room, make it feel like a premonition. (see also: Loitering)

7. Collect Symbols That Mean Nothing To Anyone But You

Carry a black lighter you never use. Wear a Saint Sebastian medallion despite never being Catholic. Keep a lock of hair in a ziplock bag labelled “2009.” Speak often of a girl named Tuesday who may or may not be real.

This is less about aesthetics and more about ritual objects. If someone asks why, say “Because it’s mine” and then walk away like you’re going to disappear between frames.

8. Only Speak in Lyrics, Obituaries, Or Threats

Refer to your exes as “characters I had to kill off.” Talk about your crush like they’re a ghost from the 1800s. Quote MCR songs in casual conversation, but obscure ones. Never “I’m not okay.” That’s for tourists. Say “It rains and it rains and it never stops” or “I held my breath for days.”

When cornered in an argument, respond with: “This face was never yours to break.” It wasn’t.

9. Turn Every Inconvenience Into A Backstory

You missed the bus? No. You were forsaken by fate. Foodpanda late? “Even sustenance rejects me.” Spilled your drink? “The world keeps bleeding out through me.”

Your entire life should read like a concept album with interludes and voice notes. Your Spotify bio would just be a sound of distant thunder and a voicemail from a dead friend.

10. Refuse To Be Perceived In 1080p

Turn off read receipts. Blur your selfies. Only post photos taken on expired film or with filters that look like haunted VHS tapes. Speak in riddles, then pretend you didn’t say anything. Make eye contact like a challenge.

If someone says “you’re hard to figure out,” take a drag from an unlit cigarette and reply, “Good.”

To be ‘Helena in the Rain’ is to be both the eulogy and the ghost.

It’s the soft sob between cymbal crashes. It’s mascara bleeding into collarbones. It’s knowing that love is real but only in songs where everyone dies by Track 11.

And if you’ve done it right, you’ll never need to say a single word about the band. People will look at you and know.

They’ll smell the rosaries and damp tulle.

They’ll feel the phantom scream in their chest.

And they’ll say, Yeah. She’s waiting for a funeral that never ends. Go forth and emo, friends. (jk, emos don’t have friends).

More fun sh*t on JUICE.