If the day is done tonight
The sun doesn’t rise tomorrow
Please tell your mother
That there never was another
And I loved her daughter
More that I could ever say

My eyes are in upside down
But you are my crown
You’re the contest and the prize
I won by being clever
As we act on our whims
Only love will be our mentor
But when you ask to come in
I’ll bid you do not enter

If the day is done tonight
The sun doesn’t rise tomorrow
Please tell your mother
That there never was another
And I loved her daughter
More that I could ever say

My ears are on backwards
Yours are the best lies I’ve ever heard
I’ll knit together all of your yarns
Into a perfect tent
You take a page from my book
And three chapters from my story
I’ll say I made you look
But I’ll never say I’m sorry

If the day is done tonight
The sun doesn’t rise tomorrow
Please tell your mother
That there never was another
And I loved her daughter
More that I could ever say

There is a photograph. Two boys stand
in straw hats, their arms draped
over each other’s shoulders, freckled
faces grinning into the camera. Behind them,
I remember, is a leaning barn, and an ancient orchard
scattered through pines. I can still feel
the summer heat blowing across the creek,
picking up the fragrance of tadpoles and rattlesnakes.
The older boy is ten, and is me.
My brother John is eight. He has already lived
more years than he has left.

I don’t know what wakes me up
this viscous afternoon. The phone
is screaming and the crazy dog
is barking like the end of the world.

Johnny is on his back in the middle
of our bedroom. Around him spreads
a puddle the color of apples. It is coming
out of his head. My father’s gun
is at his feet.

He vomits blood from his mouth and nose,
then stops breathing. He clicks.
Kneeling down, I put my hands in matted hair,
careful to keep my fingers out of the oozing holes.
I lift and turn. He gasps.

I am here in the dark, now, thinking
about hot summers and happy boys.
In the distance I hear sirens and some crazy dog
barking like the end of the world.

And she stole my sharpie.

She looked at me from under her old lady afro and asked why I was in the street. I yelled at her, and cursed her, and sent her to hell a million times.

All of my memories are in technicolour. It was so beautiful. And he yelled I’m a nurse! I’m a nurse! And the ambulance came and asked if I could walk and I lied. I said yes and fell and she caught me. I wouldn’t let them leave until they called my mom, but memory was somewhere else and I didn’t know the numbers.

I must have remembered, because she was there when the gourney came undone and I was nearly thrown back out in traffic. The ambulance doors swinging wide as I rolled toward the opening. But we were already stopped and they just rebuckled me. Like everything was fine.

Then I peed in a cup and cried and tried to sleep. I think I made a joke, but I don’t remember the punchline. I asked them to call my sister, and they did. She promised to beat that driver up for me. Sock her in the jaw. I laughed and it hurt. They Xrayed my bones.

Nothing broken but my brain. They sent me home and I ate wasabi. I don’t know if my best friend was there or if I only asked for her. I don’t know if she brought be rasberry sorbet, or if I just wished she had. I think she did, but I’ll never know for sure. Even when she tells me, it doesn’t bring my memories back.

I wrote a blog post that day, and someone sent me a care package. It had a pig in it and I named him Feodore. He smelled like licorice. I remember that part. Days after.

I didn’t scream again for a long time. I can’t open my mouth any more.

I spent most of my summers barefoot, because sweating inside your shoes is the most disgusting feeling I knew of. It still is. Everyone wore shoes that year, though. Even the really tough kids couldn’t walk on the hot sidewalk with no shoes.

My neighbour Chloe and I spent all summer together, but we only had enough energy to do two things: swimming and lying in the shade. I remember once she and I walked through the woods looking for a stream. We heard that it was glacier run off. Cold enough to give you hypothermia. Cold enough to turn your feet blue. Cold enough to freeze you insides so bad you could never digest food right, or bear children.

We were totally psyched.

In the forest we finally freed our feet of their shoe-shaped bonds on the smooth dirt paths. It was softer and cooler than the pavement. We watched our steps carefully for stones and thistles. Every now and again we stopped to proclaim over some found treasure. Shattered glasses, broken jewellery and scribbled shopping lists filled our pockets. We never did any thing with them, we just kept them. In addition to our usual finds, Chloe discovered something bizarre. There was a magazine, just off the path. The cover portrayed a tangle of sweaty limbs, which could only lead the viewer to believe that the people in the middle were having a pretty good time. Right after picking it up, she dropped it.

“Is it dirty?” She asked.

I gave her a look, “Obviously.”

“No, not—” she blushed, “Not dirty like boobies dirty. Crud and bugs dirty.”

I shook the pages. Several fat earwigs scattered to the ground. “No,” I said.

We started to look at it, but I didn’t like it. It made me want to be somewhere else. I tried to make her throw it back in the bushes, but instead she tucked it under her arm and kept walking. Eventually, we found the stream, but it was only a trickle. It wasn’t even that cold. There was no reason to stay long, but we did anyways. We sat in the woods for a long time, just thinking.

Chloe snuck the magazine into the house wrapped in her towel. Later we cracked an egg on the sidewalk and watched the foggy parts turn white.

It was the hottest summer ever.

Are you older than I am? I think you’re younger. You just seem older. We meet in the train station. We’re both going to Brooklyn. I need to pick up some food for my sister in Little Italy, and you’re just going home. I guess I look pretty tired, because you break the cardinal rule of Grand Central and ask me if I’m okay. I look at a rat crawling across the tracks ten feet from me, and I say that I’m fine.

The train station benches in New York have little dividers between the seats. We’re so intent on anonymity in this city, we can’t even let our legs touch when sit next to each other. If that isn’t enough, most people leave a seat between them and the next person. I guess it’s kind of like the urinal rule. Don’t make small talk with the man you pee with. You sit next to me. You sit like a catcher, waiting for his first strike, knees so far apart that one of yours bump one of mine. I tuck mine closer together.

The train is nothing like the station. We pack ourselves in so tightly our eyes pop, but we just stare straight ahead. You can tell the tourists from the rest of us because they look around on the subway. Sometimes they try to make eye contact, and joke about how where they come from subway is just a sandwich. You and I hold on to the same bar, pressed together, gyrating our pelvises with the swing of the train. It’s not as sexy as it sounds. It’s just what you do to keep from falling over onto the woman with the trash sack full of soda cans.

When I walk up the stairs onto the street I like to pretend that the earth is giving birth to me. At first there’s only fluorescent lights and too many bodies. Then it gets darker for a moment, and the only way you can tell you’re surrounded is by the pressure and the sound. The sound is deafening. Footsteps and breathing and the crying of infants. And then there’s the light. Christmas lights wind around trellis façades, like so many champagne grape light bulbs. The smell of garlic and fat over heat is nearly suffocating. And a phone number tucked into my back pocket.

Is it yours?

I hurry into the restaurant and get the eggplant parmigiana for my sister. She won’t eat anything else. Usually the hospital won’t let food from the outside come in, but right now they’ll do anything to keep her eating. She used to look like our mother, but not anymore. Her face is always dry, even when she cries. She and I used to be so close, but now I only talk to her about what’s on TV. There’s nothing else to talk about. I won’t say the things the doctors tell me, because if I don’t say them, maybe they won’t happen.

Before I know it, I’m back on the train, and you’re not. You were just a face and a pair of knees to me, but you were the best thing that happened all day. I try to call the number, but not even magic works underground. Besides, the splashing of air of the side of the trains would have drowned you out.

Back in the hospital I give my sister tiny bites, and she throws them up. I put my hands over hers and ask her what Oprah has said lately. She cries as I give her sips of apple juice. She asks me to braid her hair, but she doesn’t have it anymore. I start to clear the wilted flowers from her night stand and she stops me. She says she has too much in common with the dead flowers to throw them away. It’s my turn to cry.

My apartment is empty. I enter tired and dazed after the six flight walk I had to take to get there. It’s almost three am. I stay up later and later every night, trying to synchronise my waking hours with my sister’s. She sleeps longer every day, and I drink another cup of coffee.

In the morning I call in sick, and then I call you. You sound half asleep, so I check my watch. Eleven. I ask your name and you don’t answer, asking mine instead. I let you have it. I wasn’t using it anyways. You ask me to meet you in the park. I go.

The park is green. I used to think it was something really special. So much grass. Then I learned that grass just grows everywhere on its own, and that the incredible thing about this city is the buildings. The skyline still seems sort of broken after ground zero. The green stumps of buildings that pop up in its stead are nothing to the two sequoias who used to stand there. I look up and you break my horizon in half. The reservoir is on one side of you, the city on the other. I ask why you left me your number. You ask why I called it.

When we talk about our meeting, you tell me that something about me seemed different, and I say I’m the normal one. We assign ourselves titles in every setting: smart, dashing, tall, interesting—or, if you’re me—stable, boring, and average. You laugh at me and give me a candied nut. I say I’m allergic.

Later my sister asks what life is like outside, and I tell her about my day with you. She smiles and asks if I’m in love, and I say no. She asks if mom knows about you, and I say no. I don’t tell her that our mother is dead. Instead I tell her that on Canal Street, you were able to haggle a pair of twenty dollar sunglasses down to three dollars and fifty cents. I show her a picture of you making a face on my cell phone and she laughs. She asks again if I’m in love, and I say no. She doesn’t cry when I go, but her goodbye seems a little weaker than it was the day before. I kiss her where her eyebrow should be and tell her I’ll bring her new flowers tomorrow. Instead she asks me to bring you.

I hardly know you, and I don’t want you to meet my sister. This is the first thing I say to you on the third time we meet. You’re taken aback. I say that I don’t want you to meet her, but that she wants to meet you. I tell you the whole story, bracing you for impact. You tell me you had cancer once, and now you only have one testicle. You say that in the locker room at the gym you tell people you were hit by a bomb in Iraq. You never went to Iraq.

My sister is pale, but seems happy. She asks me again if I’m in love and I blush because you can hear her. I say not today, and she says she’ll wait. She’s always been good like that. Patient.

After a while she falls asleep and you and I play cat’s cradle. We talk about where we work and what we want to do with our lives. You pinch the wrong Xs and our cradle turns into tangled string. You apologize and I forgive you. I point out that this wasn’t what I pictured for a second date anyways, and that you can’t make it much worse. You kiss me and ask me if you can make it better, and after a moment I say yes. When we leave my sister asks you if you’re in love. You say that she’ll just have to wait and see.

You tell me on the train home that when you were sick you held on to see what would happen on Dawson’s Creek. I say that’s a terrible reason to go on living, and you look away and say it was enough. I feel like I’ve known you forever. I tell you so. You wrap your hand around mine on the pole we’re both clinging to, and say that we have. That we’ve been friends from birth, that we just never knew it. We’re still holding hands when we walk up the stairs to the sidewalk.

I wake up next to you. You say good morning and tell me that there’s coffee in the kitchen. I tell you you’re a real gentleman, letting me crash at your place with no pressure, and you kiss me again. Eating breakfast across from you is nice. I feel like I’m watching a time lapse video of grass as I see your stubble grow. You make scrambled eggs and I try to decline. I tell you how much I hate rich food. You make them with just salt and pepper, and no cheese. I burn my hands making you toast.

This is what my day becomes. I hop between you and her. Sometimes you follow me. You seem more like her brother than I do. She draws flowers on the backs of your hands and up your wrists. You tell her the intricacies of Dawson’s Creek. I watch you and think of what to say. Nothing comes to mind. Sometimes you read her the Chronicles of Narnia. She used to get older in this hospital, but now she’s getting younger. My older sister is a child, fragile and happy, mouth sticky from chewing gum and eyes glazed. Her bites get smaller, and every day more eggplant parmigiana is left in the takeaway box. She’s weaker now than ever. When we say goodbye she asks if we’re in love and I say yes, just as you say maybe.

I’ve known you for one week.

You say you like this apartment because you get a workout on the way up and an adrenaline rush on the way down. You always slide down the rail instead of walking like a normal person. You call it my hobbit hole, because it’s smaller than your place, and because I’m so much shorter than you. You call me little man, when you call me. This apartment could be so much more than it is, I say. Before I know it the empty room I’ve been trying to rent is full of photos. You tape them up in rows, and soon I can’t see the paint. They range in quality from poor to breath-taking. Among the the cityscapes and still life hangs a portrait of my sister in muted tones. At least, I think it’s meant to be muted. She and the hospital gown are both so pale it’s hard to see. She looks like an angel. A saint, even.

When I talk to her I pretend her mind isn’t going. The doctors say I shouldn’t hope for too much. If not for you I wouldn’t. But here you are, shaking up my world. Someone like you can ruin the healthy pessimism in a person. She always asks for you these days, and she gets your name wrong every time. When she does see you, she thinks you’re me, or our father, or our old neighbour with the cats. But you read to her anyways. She doesn’t draw on your hands anymore. I ask her what’s been on Oprah and she says Oprah is dead, just before singing God Save The Queen.

When we say goodbye she looks at the wall. Sometimes she answers me.

The spare room is called the gallery now. You commission my sister to fill a book with flowers, and you papier-mâché her drawing over a coffee table. There are two armchairs in there. They’re upholstered in white canvas. You ask me to paint them, and I say no. You call me a loveable liar, when you call me. You lead me into the room and give me a brush. You cross your arms and say you won’t leave until I paint. I say that in that case, I might never get to painting. Around midnight, you fall asleep on the couch watching reruns of American Idol. I paint.

Do you have any idea the kind of looks they give you when you come to work in ironed shirtsleeves with paint under your nails? I didn’t either until today. I said I had been painting with my sick sister. Everyone gives me sad, knowing looks when I talk about her. I feel bad using her as my alibi, but it’s just force of habit. It’s just the roles we play.

The doctors say she hasn’t got much longer. There won’t be anymore surgery or radiation. She has wisps of baby hair growing in on her scalp. They said I should take her home. There’s nothing left to do but love her. So the armchairs moved out of the gallery to occupy a corner of the dining room, and she moves in. The flowered coffee table serves as her nightstand, and you leave her a copy of A Horse And His Boy. She tries to read it, but says the words swim too much. The doctor said the tumour is putting too much pressure on her optic nerve. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t look up when I enter the room.

She’s started drawing on you again. Her flowers have turned lopsided and lumpy, like a sack of potatoes on a post. You say they look like butterflies. She asks you if you love her. You say yes.

I’ve known you for two months.

She doesn’t like eggplant anymore. Now I feed her green peas. She always know when I’ve put something in them. She says the protein powder makes her sicker. I give you a bit and you can’t taste anything. Neither can I.

She’s started to look like empty clothes. You show me pictures of you, only younger. The two of you could be twins. You look almost as tired as she does. A gameboy, a remote, or a copy of Harry Potter co-star in almost every picture. It’s hard to tell your age in these. I ask and you just say you were too young. I want to erase this. All of it. Off of you. Off of her. It’s like that layer of chalk dust you can never quite get off the black board. But instead of chalk, it’s sunburns and asbestos and chemo and being too young. I tell you how much I want to erase it. You say tough luck.

She calls me what she called me when we were kids. She calls me Doober, when she calls me. She calls you Nurse now. The location and company doesn’t seem to be apparent to her anymore. She asks if this is the hospital, or heaven. You tell her it’s somewhere in the in between. I don’t say anything at all until Oprah comes on. I try to talk to her about the topics, and keep her engaged. She ignores the TV and draws butterfly flowers on the palms of my hands.

Every time I leave the room she says goodbye. I tell her I’ll come right back, and she says she doesn’t know if she will. She cries when you go home. You always offer to stay, but I say no. Just go. Sleep in your own bed. Shower in your own shower. You don’t owe us anything. It’s Okay. You kiss me on my forehead and say you owe us everything.

My sister never finished Narnia.

I stand in the doorway of the gallery for almost an hour before you come in. You have a bag of frozen peas with you. You put it down and hold me instead. You don’t say anything. You just stand in the hallway and hold me.

You take out the number tucked in my back pocket and make the call. You call because I can’t. I can’t speak to them. I can’t bear to watch them zip her up and wheel her out. I can’t look away. They ask if I need to say a last goodbye. I dribble.

It turns out there’s no such thing as last goodbyes. Because you never think it’s the last when you say it, and if you do know it’s the last, you don’t say anything at all.

We put a third chair where her bed was. You paint a single seed dandelion up the back. The two other chairs move back in, after a while. They’re green like Central Park with a horizon painted on the backs. The city on one, the reservoir on the other. You stand in the middle, splitting them in two.

Here is the man, there is the woman, their bodies are like puzzle pieces.

I don’t have a place in this puzzle.

What is sex? What is the meaning of life?

I don’t know.

What if? What if sex. What if sex is not gender? What if it is? What if, as so many say, every relationship I embark on will turn into such trivial gender roles? What if I have to choose to be the man or the woman? What if?

Man and woman, fitting together like puzzle pieces, but where is my empty space in this puzzle?

I don’t know if I understand.

Sometimes I need to be ‘the woman.’ Sometimes I need to love you and hold you and let my emotions get in the way. I have to let my judgement be clouded by your kisses and I need you to touch me and tell me I have a good figure and a fucking great personality. That I am so much more than your barbie doll dreams. Sometimes it is imperative that I am soft, that I follow your lead.

And sometimes I am ‘the man.’ Sometimes I tell you what’s what and I throw tantrums when you defy me. I will break your heart, I will sever our ties, and I will apologise with flowers because I never did learn to use gentle words.

What is sex? Is this love? Is this what we feel? Are the softness and the hardness meant to fold together like the hands of two lovers on their wedding day?

What is marriage? You have to marry the opposite. Always the other, you never express love to yourself to your curves and your blood and your tongue in my mouth and the air.

Some people say the sky and the sea are married. But they are the same. They’re big and open and unforgiving and… beautiful. But the sky and the ocean are different, too. Air and water, and water and air, and nothing.

I don’t think I understand.

I suffer from an incredibly common disease. It is the nature of young adults to think that this condition is singular to our age group, but I’m getting old enough now to see that it is more or less universal.

My name is Carlie, and I’m a wantaholic.

There are so many things that I have that I will never need I would trade them all–and the things I do need too–to know I am wanted. I sometimes wonder if that’s what drives the human race to religion. There it is, this idea of the most powerful person in the world. He is bigger than Angelina Jolie. He is bigger than Oprah. He wants you. I sometimes wonder if this is why I am a Christian. There is this sense of belonging. We are all wanted as long as we want it back.

Christians do not always seem to feel this way. Oh those people, we say. Those people are not Christians. Those people do blank. Those people vote for XYZ. Those people are not who God planned them to be. I watch these Christians, and I cannot help but be one of them. I say, it is damn disrespectful for you to think anything was not in God’s plan. You are not who he planned you to be.

Sometimes I want to shake myself and make myself love them, and most times I succeed. Most times. Sometimes I want to shake them and say want me.