Rain, smoke and the bitter end of a cigarette, I drip poetically all over your chair and you look at me as though you have never seen me before. Surrender, survival and submission, your existence exonerates mine. We have been one, you and I. Now we are two. It is the end of the road and somewhere, somehow, in the middle of the breaking, you became the smudged ink in a book I no longer care to read.

Freedom tastes like ash on my tongue. It tastes like blood and bone and the death of my people. It sounds like the screams that accompany my memories in the darkest corners of the night. 

I have no name. They took it away. I have no home, no country, no place to call my own, no land to leave my mark on. They destroyed it.

And I will destroy them. You may laugh since I am a woman. Weak. Exploitable and entirely forgettable. But I have a will of my own. I will set them on fire. And watch them burn. As I did. As we still do.

It was the glitter of the gold on the curve of the bone beneath her eyebrow that stopped him. He blinked and took a moment to orient himself. It was night - a shallow darkness - so almost morning. And from the thumping beats vibrating the building next to him, like drum beats heralding a pagan ritual, he was next to a club. The club. Gaudy neon signs would name it Berserk. Fitting name.

He was in the alley beside the club. He didn’t know why. The stench was proof of insidious affairs he usually didn’t have the stomach for. His feet were warm - he was wearing his favourite leather boots, a steal from the thrift store in the corner of Johnson and Johnson. The coarse wool of his sweater scratched - not his favourite shirt then. Why had he worn it? He looked down.

At the girl whose neck he had his hands wrapped around. There was a pulse beating madly in the hollow of her throat, like a bird trapped underneath her skin, wanting to escape. Her mascara was stained and her lips were peeled back to reveal nice teeth even though the scream she was in the middle of screaming contorted her face hideously. Her eyes were shot red. Afraid. He gave an experimental squeeze and the scream cut off midway, ending on a gasping wheeze.

Her hair was yellow. A fuck me yellow. A lie. He removed his hands from around her neck and sat back on his haunches, watching her with his silver eyes. She scrambled away from him, panic, panic, panic, flight. She ran, her mouth open spewing curses that would make a sailor blush. Then she was gone. He stood up and felt a rather odd regret.

It was the glitter of the gold that had brought him back into his head. He took out his packet of cigarettes. Grabbed one. Lit it. Inhaled. Then headed back to the club.

“I don’t like love songs.”
Juliet, drunk on red crystals of heartstuff, announces to the bemused world.

Any errant romeo (notice the lower caps) will tell you that love songs are cliche. As are violins (and villains) and caviar (too salty, the nutritionists say). All the cool people now slash their wrists (horizontal, they don’t really want to die) and eat pomegranate.

This world of fairy lights, double faces and corrosive (say it out loud and feel it on your tongue, yes, just like that) desire that eats away your skin and mine, and reveals your bloody heart to mine.

I seem to be dissolving.

Dearest -

I can call you that, right? I can evince the softest shade of emotion for you? You don’t mind? No? Okay then.

Dearest,

My heart is a pomegranate. Red. Ripe. Ready to burst. On your tongue. In your hands. I

( let’s pretend I exist in the singular, worn body and tired eyes aside)

am cohesively yours. In parts and together. A fingernail from my left hand, my right ear, my belly and my ankle. All yours. A patched up woman. And even though you are not mine

(and never will be but this is a dream so I shall forgive you that)

I will pretend you are. Your smile, your skin rough against my cheeks, your hands on my body as though you are shaping me to your desires - your very own sculptor

(maybe I am half stone, I suspect I am)

to display or veil.

(You look at me as if the interlude is over. It is over? Oh.)

The curtains flutter in the afternoon breeze and you are giving me your public smile. The one that says there is distance between us and measures it as a mile too far from your heart to mine.

(Why do you never say goodbye when you leave?)

She dreams of fame through mists of blood. She seeks eternity in sex and lust, in the planes of his stomach, the plumpness of his lips. She shatters like a clockwork, every day at three in the morning under the neon lights of the latest club.

She has a dozen secrets hidden in the twist of her lips. Her eyes are older than her face, older than the body she gives away more freely than she should. She loses herself in the cracks in the pavement and finds herself hours later under another faceless man.

She craves and she craves and she craves and her fingernails leave welts on the back of another unsuspecting victim. She’s the love it and leave it kind, the love it and break it kind, the one who will take you in and toss you out and the one you should not remember but can’t forget. Perhaps, if we were the civilized type, we would sit down opposite each other and talk, perhaps we would eat a meal together and find out that we do not fit together in the way people are supposed to.

But time is too fleeting and so she grasps and gasps and breathes and when the pieces don’t fit and the heart remains untouched, she wipes her hands on yet another discarded shirt and moves on.

You were there, you know. That night. That day. You were watching as they did those things to me. I saw you watching them end me like it was an episode from that crappy television show you are addicted on.

I lack the words.

I. Is there even an I anymore? Am I still a person? Or the remains of one? What was left of me - you picked me up and took me home and left me on your window sill in a brown cardboard box soggy from the rain. Ashes and memory.

A feeling of deja vu. That feeling, you know that feeling, the one that says you have forgotten someone. Me. You have forgotten me. I am in the bloodstained shirt you hid under your bed in the shoebox that still have the shoes you received at Christmas. That’s me, the dirt under your fingernails. My tears remain on your skin and my scent is there in that spot on your neck where your pulse beats.

I am the chill you feel in the shower when you attempt to scrub me off your body. I will forever be the hitch in your heart when you remember that night. That rainy night, the pavement I kissed and my blood. My blood. Your hands. Red.

I will compose a letter to you in three parts:

1. I saw you and my world screeched to a halt and even the birds held their breaths, their wings quivering. To fight or flee. To consume or be subsumed.

2. I held your hand. And you held mine. It was beautiful.

3. The words you said in my ear warmed the nape of my neck, my lips, the soles of my feet. Your words tangled in my hair and held on to my waist. And when I returned those words to you, dressed in blue, the hitch in your breath, the sudden moistening of your eyes - that was enough.

I was ten when they found me. Hiding behind my mother’s brown skirts, bewildered by the soldiers, by their rough hands. I remember my father’s face when they took me away from our house. The scream that didn’t leave his throat. He watched them take me away with eyes that dared not overflow. The chickens scratched in the dirt, unconcerned. There were puffy clouds in the cerulean sky. It was a lovely afternoon.

I was thirteen when he married me. It was a winter morning. I was dressed in ivory and lace. My breasts were just bumps on my chest and the woman’s blood had only just stained my thighs the week before. The women around me, my attendants, didn’t speak as they handled my dress (it was a work of art, two years in the making) and the bouquet (flowers stolen from the most precious gardens). They put diamonds in my hair and rouge on my cheeks.

I closed my eyes and became a mannequin.

There was a ceremony. I don’t remember it. Mannequins do not have much capacity for memory. He took my hand in his larger one and clasped it. He smelled like cinnamon and the forest. He was large, had a beard he took great care with and eyes the colour of amber in sunlight. His lips were pink and there was a mole under his left eye. He was the king, my husband.

He came to me that night, he came to me in my chamber. I had been dressed in a nightgown. It felt as though it was made of gossamer, soft like a kiss. There were no candles left lit. He opened the door, closed it and then locked it. The sound of the key turning in the lock did a strange thing to my breathing. I sat upright in bed and watched him as he shuck his garments. This man. The king. My husband.

He touched me. Forced my legs apart. Broke me. I remained quiet. Because mannequins don’t scream. Mannequins don’t cry. But. Mannequins do bleed. I bled.

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like if the shape of your lips, the size of your eyes, the straightness of your teeth determined the person people thought you were? Have you ever felt that strangers measured the sway of your hips and calculated your morals accordingly? Felt the way their eyes took off each item of clothing you wore and look at you naked. What it would be like if the length of your neck, the shadow cast by your eyelashes and the colour and curl of your hair were topics of intense conversation.

Your voice is of no consequence. They prefer you silent.

Do you know the feeling when what you look like becomes who you are?

It feels as though you living in a world where every single thing and person is a glass. And all you see as you look around are reflections of yourself. Specific flavors of reflection. Kind ones, cruel ones, lust, pleasure and envy.

You want to shatter everything around you because you don’t want to look at yourself again.

The king, my husband, had a daughter. Two years younger than me. But he wanted a son. He wanted a son very much but no matter how much I bled, his seed would not take in me and my womb remained empty. I would have told him that mannequins can’t procreate but he didn’t like it when I spoke in his presence.

I was seventeen when the king, my husband, was killed in an accident. It was midnight when we got the news. He had been returning home from a visit to his western provinces. The horses had been spooked, they said. He had broken his neck in the fall. A snake was scheduled to be hanged for the death of a king.

We waited two weeks after the funeral for any illegitimate man children to come forward. To claim the crown. There were none. He had sired none. Some said it was because he loved his wives. Others said it was because he couldn’t.

I became Queen on a green Thursday morning. It was spring. Bluebells grew profusely. The king’s daughter looked at me warily. The mirrors multiplied.

The king’s daughter and I were not friends. It is difficult to like a child whose father makes you bleed. But she was not my enemy. Not even when the mirrors started reflecting her too. My world became brittle and I was held into place by men who directed the world through my hands. I became a puppet.

Until the day they told me that the king’s daughter was to be married off to a man countless years her senior. I didn’t like the king’s daughter but I did not want her to bleed like I had. Like I still did. So I told her to flee. I bade her go. I told the woodsman to take her away to a place she could be free.

They turned on me when they found her gone. The king’s people. They called me jealous, they reflected me as ugly. The whispers began when I entered a room, an obeisance constructed of mockery and buoyed by sneers. It didn’t matter to me. Mannequins are impervious to thorny words.

It was a Friday when I found the king’s daughter in my chamber. The air was stretched tight between us. She asked me why I sent her away. If I was afraid that her lips were shapelier than mine. At that moment, in that question, the mannequin queen and the king’s daughter came to crossroads. We looked at each other for the first time: she, a princess and I, more stolen child than queen. One bred in captivity, the other forced to live in it. One wanting to fly and the other wanting to gild the bars of her cage a square gold. We looked at each other, the orange twilight creating shadows and I made a decision.

I was nineteen when I fled the king’s ghost, the king’s castle and the king’s daughter. I left behind the mannequin princess and the body of a queen. I removed the rouge from my cheeks and the gossamer silk from my skin. The mirrors began reflecting someone else and the mannequin queen became a villain, a corpse, reanimated, a disappearance, a mystery.

It was a Tuesday when I reached home. My mother still wore those brown sack-like skirts of hers. My father cried when he saw me. There were fewer chickens in the yard and there were no clouds in the sky. It tasted like freedom. The strings were finally cut.

He was like a conversation you weren’t supposed to overhear.

He was bad for you. Everyone told you that. Even that old grandma you weren’t sure still remembered your name.

So bad that your mother wouldn’t talk to you for days and every time your father looked at you, disappointment coated your skin. 

You called it love, you called it fate and once, in the dark of the night, under the north star, you called it your penitence.

He was. Even now, years later when your mother is talking to you again and your father doesn’t look at you like it hurts and that old grandmother has moved on, you can’t affix an adjective to his existence.

He was. And he’ll always remain in that one last piece of you that is perpetually dark.

Inohara Mio had lived seventeen years of her life repressed by thoughts of what society thought was right and wrong. She had been afraid to act as she wanted to, say what she wanted to because she had been too scared of being judged by people whose opinions she thought had some meaning – would have some effect on her life.

Things changed when she went to see her family doctor for what was a mild but persistent headache. He sent her for some tests because that was what doctors did. It turns out that she had a tumour growing deep in the gray matter of her brain. An entirely inoperable spot. They would try laser, they reassured her parents but the sad truth was, her chances of seeing the conclusion of the eighteenth year of her life were slim to none.

Inohara Mio didn’t quite know how to react to the news. What’s death supposed to mean when you have barely started living? She couldn’t fathom the idea of a day dawning without her being in the world. She couldn’t understand the idea of not existing.

Her parents were distraught and sought second opinions; voodoo doctor, witches; priests. You name it, they sought it. But facts were facts, weren’t they?

She, Inohara Mio, was going to die. And as fate would have it, it would be sooner rather than later. So she asked the kind but oh so sad neurologist how long she had.

“Give or take a week, five months.” He replied.

So she tried again. How long did he think she had to be totally functional?

Retaining the use of her mind as well as her limbs before the tumour rendered her a vegetable?

“Depending upon your response to our drugs, four months.” The doctor replied even more sadly.

Inohara Mio then thanked him for his patience and his enduring kindness and returned home. Understand that she still wasn’t sold on the idea of death – it seemed a waste to be born and grow up and to die just before you reached adulthood. But she understood enough to realize that discourse on the fact, wailing against the fact would change nothing. Praying might but Inohara Mio wasn’t quite sure how she felt about God at that point.

She returned to school after a month’s break against her parents’ wishes. She had four months and she was going to live them as she wanted to.

She, even though she had been a repressed sort, had managed to get a group of friends – genuine friends who at this moment were more than a little pissed off at her for her unexplained absence. Amongst her friends were three boys and two girls. In no particular order, they included Toshi, Yu, Jun, Erika and Rumi. All of them had their own quirks but the time limitations forbids elaboration on any of them. Suffice it to say that all of them were people – people stuck in the curious space between childhood and adulthood – who fit in no other group so they had created their own. The majority of them had been friends since elementary school and the group had survived despite the break up between two of its members. When Mio returned to school, (late, she had forgot to set her alarm), they passed her a note asking her to meet them in the usual spot at lunch.

Mio passed a note to Toshi telling him to tell the others that she would be there but late. Because Mio had something else to do first. Before the chemo made her lose her hair and the other drugs robbed her of whatever pretty she had naturally.

She was going to confess her love.

He was the basketball star. Obviously Mio had impossible aspirations but hey, she was dying. She might as well ask for the impossible.

When the lunch bell rang, she sent a bright smile to the two in her group who were in the same class as her and slipped out of the classroom. She went out to the courtyard and through the connecting corridor to the outside eating area. Lunch break stalking had told her that this was where Hagiwara Kenta also known as Ken spent his break. Surrounded by his proverbial harem.

Mio was well aware of her position on the grand Girl Looks scale. She wasn’t particularly out of the world as far as looks were concerned but she wasn’t shabby. Natural, she had been called. The thing was, Ken didn’t go for natural looking girls. He went for the kind who looked like they inhaled plastic for breakfast. Perky breasts, blonde hair, short skirts. Made up, fashionable. Mio had never really used makeup before. Her parents were old fashioned.

She spied Ken in his usual spot and as usual surrounded by buxom beauties.

At this point you may ask; did Mio really love someone who seemed as shallow and superficial as this guy?

The answer would be no. Mio had no idea what love was. She simply knew that she liked this boy and she didn’t have time enough to look for other potential lovers so he would have to do.

Usually when a girl is about to confess her … well, in this case, like, there is at least the faintest feeling of nerve. Inohara Mio, however, had no such feeling. When you are staring death in the face from a little ways, what’s one confession and the resulting rejection to you? Because Mio was quite sure that he would say no. But she wasn’t about to die without confessing at least once.

She registered the twitters as she got nearer to the greatly lauded Ken. He was too immersed in his technical gadget to immediately notice her but the girls’ comments (something about drab, maybe) got his attention. He looked up and his eyebrows rose when Mio met his eyes without the prerequisite amount of blushing. In fact, he seemed quite disconcerted at her direct gaze. But he got his equilibrium back soon enough and smiled a smile that seemed designed to make melty knees out of what were previously sturdy limbs.

“How can I help you?” He asked, somehow making the innocuous words into a decadent, sinful suggestion.

Mio blinked and sighed once. She was dying not already dead. He was beautiful and she was still in sound possession of her hormones. The other girls observed, like vultures, at the ready to swoop down and mock her once she was rejected.

Mio shrugged mentally and went for it. “I’m not really sure but I think I like you. And since I don’t have much time, I thought I’d tell you that I might like you.” She made her speech and as an afterthought, added a bright smile.

Ken’s eyes widened. “You think you might like me?” He repeated.

Mio nodded.

“You’re not sure?” He spoke slowly as if the idea of someone not liking him hadn’t ever occurred to him.

“No. But I probably do like you.” Mio hastened to console him.

“Why don’t you have much time?” He asked instead.

“If I tell you, you’ll feel compelled to date me unless you are a total bastard (which I don’t think you are) so let’s just say, I don’t have much time and leave it at that.” Mio replied almost cheerfully. She didn’t realize that their conversation had garnered a lot of attention and as such an audience. She also didn’t see Toshi and Erika standing at the edge of crowd. Gaping.

Ken didn’t reply.

“Can you hurry up?” Mio interrupted his silence. “I have to meet my friends and eat lunch before the bell rings.”

“How much time do you have?” He finally said.

“Four months.” Mio answered. He got up from his seat, upsetting the girl who had been leaning on him.

“Okay.” He nodded almost to himself. “For the next four months, I’ll be your boyfriend.”

Mio was a bit stunned. She hadn’t expected an answer in the positive. “Eh?” She gaped at him.

“What? Have you changed your mind about liking me?” He quizzed.

“No but my calculations never came out with you actually agreeing so I don’t quite know how to react right now.” Mio was candid and Ken’s lips stretched into what might have been his first genuine smile.

“You are interesting.” He said in lieu of an explanation. “Let’s go meet your friends and eat lunch.”

Mio gave him another surprised look but allowed him to follow her to what her group’s ‘usual’ spot was. The roof. It was usually off limits to the student population but Rumi was the principal’s rebellious daughter with sticky fingers.

Toshi and Erika were already at the scene when Mio arrived with Ken in tow. And they had filled in the others on what had occurred downstairs. The silence that followed Mio’s cheerful hello would have been deafening if not for the usual noises of the day.

“Mio…are you serious about him?” Rumi glared in Ken’s direction, Ken who stood very close to Mio (entirely too close in Jun’s opinion but no one was asking him).

“Well,” Mio risked a glance back and blushed at Ken’s proximity, “I suppose so.”


“Why were you not in school for the entire month?” Yu demanded. He had been worried sick.

Mio took a deep breath. “I have something to tell you guys. Well, I suppose I should tell you too…er…Ken?” She moved and assumed a position in front of them all. They all gave her their attention. Rumi, Erika, Jun, Toshi, Yu and Ken. Especially Ken. Mio felt her hands get clammy. She looked around the roof. Fortunately they were the only law breakers at the moment. Her heart started pounding and nausea roiled in her stomach. Well, there was no other way to say it so she took a deep breath. “I’m dying.”

For a minute, no one replied. And then Toshi snickered. “Good one, Inohara. You had me there for a second.” The other four started laughing in varying degrees of relief. Except Ken who fixed his quiet eyes on Mio and Mio who remained silent. And unamused.

Their laughter fizzled out at Mio’s unchanging countenance. At her solemnity. “You are joking, right?” Erika asked uncertainly.

“Yes she is.” Yu said firmly. “Right?” It was a plea, this time.

Mio sighed. “No.” She answered softly. “Tumour. Inoperable. Impossible.” An entirely mirthless smile accompanied her words. Her friends, people who loved her, reacted as loved ones usually do. Some of them cried while others denied that she was telling the truth. Mio met Ken’s eyes.

“You can leave now.” She told him. “I don’t know how you feel about spending time with someone who is probably going to die. If you get attached to me, you might feel pain when I’m no longer here.”

“Why did you ask me out?” He asked her, ignoring the fact that their exchange was being avidly observed.

“Because I haven’t kissed anyone yet. I have never held hands and walked home. I haven’t had my heart broken and while I won’t be able to live all of my life before I die, I want to taste just a little bit of it before I do.” She was enveloped in a hug before she finished speaking, the girls crying the tears she refused to acknowledge.
He didn’t leave.

Not once during the following five months did he walk away from her.


Their first date was gate crashed by five other people who didn’t think it right that he got to monopolize her. Their first kiss was captured on camera by her prying mother. He first held her hands on the day she confessed to him when he walked her home from school. He first made love to her when she lost all her hair because of chemo and was convinced she was the ugliest girl in the entire world. He held her close, with his heart racing against her chest and he told her that perhaps this was the first time in his entire life that he had ever understood what it truly meant to be beautiful.

Her guy friends shaved their heads in support of her new look but she wouldn’t let Ken do it because she wanted him pretty until the end. A comment that made him angry and her friends snicker. Erika was determined to do so too but Mio convinced her that Toshi would never forgive Mio and this would mean Mio would not be able to rest in peace.

Her friends and Ken ditched school with her and they went to festivals and to the beach and Mio watched the sakura blossom for the very last time. She sat around a bonfire and toasted marshmallows and she sang out of tune in front of an empty stadium. She wore red lipstick and a black wig and strutted down main street pretending to be a supermodel. She had chocolate for breakfast and danced in the rain. She kissed her parents good night every single night and instructed her little brother on the most important ways to calm their parents down once she was gone. She wrote letters to everybody who meant the world to her and hid them in a tin under her bed so they would find it when she was gone.

She watched her last sunset while sitting in Ken’s arms on the balcony of her hospital room. She took a series of pictures with her family, her friends and Ken and called it “The End of a Journey.”

And two hours before she died, she smiled as brightly as she could and looked around at the people who had loved her and the people whom she had loved and whispered the happiest thank you she could before slipping into a sleep she would never wake up from.

Blue. His eyes were blue. Cornflower blue.

Wet leather, carpet stains, corduroy jacket with brown patches at the elbows. Weathered brief case and creased pants.

Shaggy hair, black sprinkled with grey. Crooked teeth and tanned cheeks. Lean. Thin. Craggy. Complicated.

Love amongst the dusty tomes filled with the words of long dead poets. Love behind closed doors, locked. Love, extra quiet just in case someone heard. Caresses flavored with guilt. Kisses that felt like despair or maybe desperation. His hands rough on my skin, searching, searching for the familiar curves of a body that is not mine.

That ring on his finger, damning him, damning me, damning us and what we did. His tears when he thought I was asleep, tired, worn out, exhausted. Love that tasted like helplessness and felt like regret. Love that cursed itself even in the middle of its making.

I saw her once. His wife. Another four letter word.

She. Blonde hair, wide smile, eyes green with laugh lines fanning out. Graceful. Dressed in the soft colours of security. The whole to his half.

I realized it then. I had no part in their equation. I was the artificial construct. The Other. The personification of a youth too soon relinquished to duty and marriage and desiring to, once again, thrill. I was the sin to be confessed on Sunday to a red cheeked priest. The stuff blackmails are made of.

She would be flowers on afternoons, jewelry just because, and dinner out with decade long friends.She is what memories are made of, what the subtext in poetry whisper of. 

And he?

Of the cornflower blue eyes and fumbling hands?

He is lost in his need both for what he can’t have and what he already does.

It’s not a specific tragedy that steals the sleep from my eyes tonight – it’s the ever present realization, as soft as gossamer wings beating against bare skin – it’s the lack of language and the lack of heart and the lack of  me in these words that keep on getting colder. No dreams of heat. No feelings of passion. A cold blanket of eternity – a darkness without stars. Just an image of a thought falling apart on itself. A sharp separation of the soul from the body. Even as the soul cleaves. These words, these cold words, the lack of passion, feelings – I have emptied myself of feeling. Who am I? what am i? why do I matter? Do I matter?

I wanted to talk about a candle. A lit candle in a dark room. Flickering in the breeze that wafts in through a window slid open. White, shabby curtains, the walls are brown in the dark. The light from the candle is not much. Barely enough to illuminate the body on the bed sparsely made with a faded sheet that has seen better springs. But it’s clean. The candle is halfway melted, the wax has accumulated on the earthen dish in which the candle stands. There is someone on the bed. A brown body. Asleep. Shorn hair. A white singlet, sweatpants bunched up at his knees. It’s a young man. Brown arms, strong, muscular. There are scars on his arms. White and angry. He is sleeping on his chest and the only thing that gives breaks his silence is the gentle sigh of his breathing. Controlled.

There are no pictures in the room, no personal decorations. Nothing that would indicate that someone lived there – but there is a closet. On the far corner of the room, away from the window. Carefully hidden in the shadows so that barely any light falls on it. It is immense. Made of mahogany. Tall doors, grooved, padlocked. Hiding the secrets of the man within. It takes over the room and the man – it’s presence magnified by the shadows it casts.

The candle flickers, fights. There is a gust of breeze. The candle loses. The shadows deepen.

Dearest,

your name leaves my lips like an epiphany, a benediction to the world. A rush of endearments in a love letter hastily constructed with borrowed adjectives and false emotion. Darling, you are under my skin, in my eyes, on my finger tips and I write and write wanting to get you out of me - it is the most intimate violation - you are in my mind. I carol your words and parrot your opinions and my me-ness is in danger of being subsumed by you. So, my love, forgive me when I cleave away from you, when I walk, run, escape from you. It is not because I don’t love you, sweetheart, it is because I do.

Today’s challenge, ladies and gentlemen, is to:

Express yourself in blue. In green and tangerine. With a slight hint of lemon. And some ginger. It’s good for your throat.

So, come on now, gird your loins and answer us this: Who are you?

I’m a girl. I mean, a woman.

You see, I’ve been so used to being a girl that it is a bit difficult to take off that skin and put on the skin of a woman. Go up one level, so to speak. She’s strange, this woman that I am. Full of contradictions and more complex than the girl me. She’s full of the night sky and the night stars and instead of the summer sun, she loves the biting chill of the winter night. Of cold breezes that kiss your lips cold.

But she’s not just a woman. She hopes that her gender does not define her. And yet, she defines herself by her gender. Who she is is interwoven so tightly with what she is that she scarcely knows herself.

And love?

What about it? Well if you want to, we can drag out the grand treatises the brain wrote after The Grand Heartbreak of the latter part of the 90s. We can pore over the margins of the journals scribbled with one name over and over again. Compare charts that graphed the intensity of the pain versus the heat of the embarrassment. Or the careful notes on the roles of chocolate when it comes to healing wounds in the heart. I dare say ice cream plays a role too.

Life too.

There’s life and there’s death and both are intertwined. A small history of grief starting with a grandfather and most recently a grandmother. A small knowledge of tears and hospitals and watching the heartbeats decrease in a person that used to be whole. Nights spent watching the gradual emptying of a body of its soul. And the comfort gained from the proximity of heartbeats during the night after a loss.

And now, she says, the sky is blue. The silence corrupted and the green of the trees blinding. The slate of the roads tempting and forever is mutable. Eternity remains a word and there is no I.