Bailey loved both Toby and me so much – he and I almost make up her whole heart, and maybe that’s it, what we were trying to do by being together, maybe we were trying to put her heart back together again.
He looks at me incredulously. “I think you’re amazing... ” Why would he think this? Bailey is amazing and Gram and Big, and of course Mom, but not me. I am the two-dimensional one in a 3-D Family.
And then we are kissing, so far into the sky I don’t think we’re ever coming back. If anyone asks where we are, just tell them to look up.
I’d need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.
When people fall in love, they burst into flames.
But then I think about my sister and what a shell-less turtle she was and how she wanted me to be one too. C’mon, Lennie, she used to say to me at least ten times a day. C’mon Len. And that makes me feel better, like it’s her life rather than her death that is now teaching me how to be, who to be.
People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn’t. It continues and is ever-changing.
How can the word love, the word life, even fit in the mouth?
What kind of world is this? And what do you do about it? What do you do when the worst thing that can happen actually happens?
The architecture of my sister’s thinking, now phantom. I fall down stairs that are nothing but air.
I suddenly feel left out of a future that isn’t even going to happen.
I could step out of this sad life like it’s an old sorry dress.
We wish with our hands, that’s what we do as artists.
In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I’m not.
I gasp, because Isn’t that just exactly what I’ve been doing too: writing poems and scattering them to the winds with the same hope as Gram that someone, someday, somewhere might understand who I am, who my sister was, and what happened to us.
The guy’s life drunk, I think, makes Candide look like a sourpuss. Does he even know that death exists?
When he plays all the flowers swap colors and years and decades and centuries of rain pour back into the sky.
I don’t know how the heart withstands it.
For the first time in our lives, I’m somewhere she can’t find, and I don’t have the map to give her that leads to me.
And why do English people sound smarter than the rest of us? Like they should be awarded the Nobel Prize for a simple greeting?