But it was all a ruse – we played so we could fall asleep in the same bed without having to ask, so we could wrap together like a braid, so while we slept our dreams could switch bodies.
Then he bestows the final commandment onto me: Thou shalt remake the world.
I try to calm myself by counting his freckles to see if there are any that are new.
I close my eyes and drown in color, open them and drown in light because billions and billions of buckets of light are being emptied on our heads from above.
At the same time, we reach for each other and then we’re in each other’s arms, joined together, pressed together, but this time not kissing, not moving, just holding each other so tightly. Moments pass, lots and lots of them, with us holding on, it feels like for dear life, or maybe holding on to dear life. So dear.
I break stick after stick, using each one down to the very nub, so it’s like the blackness is coming out of my finger, out of me, and onto the page.
No time to waste, nothing to lose. We are remaking the world, nothing less, understand?
I have a heart so I can give it to you alone!
Mom used to say when you look at art, it’s half seeing, half dreaming. Same with ghosts, maybe.
What if as much as I fear having death as a shadow, I’m beginning to like how it quickens the pulse, not only mine, but the pulse of the whole world. I.
Grandma would put up the closed sign for my sewing lessons. At the table in the back of her shop, I’d sit on her lap and breathe in her flowery scent while learning to cut and drape and stitch. “Everyone gets a one-and-only and you’re mine,” she’d tell me. “Why me?” I’d always ask, and she’d nudge her elbow into my ribs and say something silly like, “Because you have such long toes, of course.
Hey one sec, Oscar.” I catch him outside the door and brush a layer of dust off the back of his jacket. “That’s one dirty floor,” I say as I slip the hot burning words into his pocket. As I press play on my life.
We’re petal people. I think about the earthquake kiss in the alcove and want to cry again. This time because I am sad. And scared. And because my skin has never fit this badly before.
I did four pastel drawings from the permanent collection – a Chagall, a Franz Marc, and two Picassos. I picked those because I could tell the paintings were looking at me as hard as I was looking at them.
Most of the time people look less like you remember when you see them again. Not him. He’s shimmering in the air exactly like he’s been in my mind. He’s a light show.
Forget shutters, if I could put the Great Wall of China around him and me, I would.
My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier.
She can’t just barge into my most secret world and then try to show me around it. Get out, I want to holler at her. Get out of my room. Get out of my life. Get out of my paintings. Get out of everything! Blow back to your realm already and leave me alone. How can you take this experience away from me before I’ve even gotten to experience it.
I’m at the edge of the world looking for my brother.
Grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us the mirrors how to reflect us the walls how to contain us Grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or rings the bell a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust that buries itself deep in the ground while everyone is sleeping Grief is a house where no one can protect you where the younger sister will grow older than the older one where the doors no longer let you in or out.
To reverse destiny, stand in a field with a knife pointed in the direction of the wind.