Sunlight through tall windows on soft carpet where I lay, the colors and sounds of it dancing through my mind. Broccoli cheese soup and chocolate, just me and my beautiful, brown-bird mama; raspberries on my fingertips, bunnies watching us plant pansies in the grass. Blood streaming out of my ears as Dr. Dad looks on, tool in hand.
My daddy cut off a Baptist preacher's balls. He once injected my mother, his wife, with enough TB to produce the scar tissue that still shows on chest X-ray. Her mysterious chronic illness has aspects of Behçet's, a rare autoimmune disease found along the Silk Road, where consumption first made its way around the ancient world through love and money. Through him, I am so much more Jewish than half-blood imagined. My father is not in my story.
Like Mary Magdalene in the book I am writing, I have been paid to love other people's husbands and children alike, to be the middle-man of their lives with each other. I made them all draw pictures, with lotion on my stomach or with markers at the table. I wanted them to see themselves as human. It was too hard.
After work, my back feels like a pimple ready to pop. I've never been good at telling when the right time is, though, so I'm having the conversation with you now, in my mind. Why do you insist I live the life you were doomed to, the life that has made you so old? I have a destiny. It involves failing. That part is not my concern.
I am walking in the rain with my umbrella in my pack because the water's cool and lovely on my face. There is a woman by the water with a gray and shell-strung blanket, and she's walking in the sun along my way. I go to her until the only water is the ocean by our toes, and the droplets of words as yet unformed in our mouths. There are no old men on this shore – it's famous for that. Only old women, and children who are too old to love them.
The mist rises up a bit from the deeper waves, and as it is carried toward us by the wind, the blanketed woman speaks to me. I see her hair is made of shells, too, and realize I have forgotten to listen, so I just nod and thank her. She pulls my hand to her face and smiles, kisses it. We stare out into the mist until it is rinsing over us, and she reaches into my pack for the umbrella poking out. It comes out a tent instead, bulbous and open, and she sets it calmly on the waves, climbs in, and is gone. I see it bob out, farther and farther, filled with pastel shells, flowers cascading in rice-threaded lines from the ceiling, and a face that moves too fast to read. Yet I will write her face, for it is my memoir.