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YOUR THREE BIRTHDAYS
NUMBER ONE:
the Age on the cake does not reflect the Age in your mind. You are so old and yet barely even born at the exact same time.
You tell Me, late at night, when the sun is asleep and all things gentle have died, that you mourn for a child you do not even know. a kid that does not exist.
You have limbs that ache from years of being a teenager and you cry when the dog dies in movies. you want to play on playgrounds and you feel the urge to paint run through your veins when it is late at night and we should both be buried in slumber. you want to laugh because the punchline to jokes is familiar and you want to lie down because you miss your mom.
you want to fade away into a you-sized abyss because every feeling you’ve ever felt is on the tip of your tongue, unrecognizable.
you want to scream. you want to punch.
you want to run.
BEFORE EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE
[CAST: YOU AND ME. SCENE: LATE AT NIGHT, AFTER SAYING GOODNIGHT.]
YOU: I cut my finger today.
ME: While mincing carrots? Let me see.
[ YOU give ME your hand ]
ME: The knife ran deep. It’s going to scar.
YOU: It will?
ME: It will. That’s okay.
it’s okay. I am here and I am alive and I too want to fade away into the you-sized abyss.
I take your hand. Let’s run together.
YOU ARE THREE AND YOU CUT YOUR HAIR
“Painty?” I ask, closing the door behind me. There is a group of people we know playing a card game in the lobby, but it is not amusing—it is all sighs and gentle coddles and the way lovers lean into each other’s sides when they laugh. It is the way that you are still in our room because you have not left the bed since the concert. It is the way I am out of place in any social setting without you.
“Painty,” I sing, because you are not in our bed. There is a chance you fell out, and you are only having floor time. I like floor time, because it is when you are so weighed down by love that all I can do is sit down next to you and hold your hand and whisper pretty things in your ear. “Where are you?”
I like floor time because it means you are not in our bed.
You have been rotting between the sheets. I know it. I know that you know I know it. You do not eat and you do not sleep and you do not even pet Baxter when I hand him to you. You just stare and hold me close and try to forget that the world was ever not real in the first place.
“In here,” comes your muffled voice. It sounds vertical, in that strange way that getting out of bed sometimes makes it. “Door’s unlocked.”
I open the door to the bathroom and enter carefully, quietly. Like you are more spooked rat then object.
You look at me in the reflection of the mirror when I come in and I smile at your own reflection in response. It makes the ends of your eyes soften and you look younger than you should be. It makes you look older than you are.
“Why are we staring at ourselves?” I ask, standing behind you. You blink at the question and I make a funny face in the mirror and it is so easy for both of us to pretend like we are a few days younger. It is so easy for me to scrunch my lips up like a duck and pretend like the world is not a rotten place, and we have been created for a reason to be something other than rotten people.
You shrug your shoulders, but your hand comes up to the bags underneath your eyes and leaves them shiny. “‘Dunno.”
That’s okay, too. You don’t have to know. You can look at yourself in the mirror without any reason and I will smile because you got out of bed. You can act like you are the big, tough monster you pretend to be, and I will watch you with admiration, because getting out of bed is the first step and I love that you are able to do it and I love that you are willing to try for every single step of the way.
I don’t care that there’s more than one step. As long as you’re willing to take my hand and step in line with me. We can pair our strides like we used to do and Suitcase will laugh and call us married like she used to do and everything can be unsolvable. Unimportant.
And that was okay.
YOUR MOTHER IS (WAS) BLONDE
you always told me that your favorite color was yellow because your mother had the prettiest blonde hair you had ever seen.
I told you my favorite color was Yellow because it was me and I was it. You laughed and I laughed and we never thought more of that. Of this concept of a color.
In hindsight, I want to ask you if it’s changed. If your favorite color is something
well. Other.
i don’t think there’s a good time to ask you.
YOU: How do you know it will be okay?
ME: I cut off my finger once—the current of the ocean is sharper than you know and the rocks that coat the bottom cut deeper than you think. All it takes is for gentle skin to rub against eroded surfaces once, before pain bleeds down the inside of your limbs.
[ ME and YOU stare at your ten fingers, whole ]
ME: Sorry, that’s kind of morbid. Did you know?
YOU: No, but I understand.
YOU: It’s funny. My heart bleeds the same way when I worry about you.
ME: Sorry.
YOU: Did you know?
“I’m—” you start, and I wait patiently like I never have. “Upset.”
“I know,” I respond, and I wrap my hands around the middle of your handle and sway you back and forth. You are so beautiful and so kind and yet oh-so lonely all at the exact same time. An enigma of feelings that I have yet to digest. Your fingers fly to my wrists and we both know I would let go if you asked, but you do not ask and I do not let go. And we exist. “I know you are.”
“I don’t think I have the right to be,” you say again, and I hum.
You're wrong, I want to say, even if I know it’s not what you want to hear. You are upset and that is okay and you deserve to be upset for however many days it has been deemed necessary ( forever, in my opinion ).
We have just been told that we exist for somebody’s own selfish reasons, robbed of anything that would have granted us life. We have just been told that we are no longer immortal. I am upset as well.
I have just been told that I cannot rake my hands through your bushels for the rest of eternity, rotting away forever by your side. I have just been told that there is an expiration date on the two of us, no longer young lovers; fooled to be mortal.
And so I want to tell you that you have the right to be upset and I do too and we should be upset together; we should throw vases that do not belong to us on the ground, and we should live like we can die. You should yell into the night and I should kiss you under the stars and we should grow old; now that we can. Now that we are.
But I don’t. “Why not?”
“Because I didn’t earn it,” you say. Always righteous, never selfish. Guilt is something you earn. Anger is something granted to you. You need to learn how to take and steal and thieve, I think. “I mean, Knife literally died . I should be happy I’m even still alive!”
“Paintbrush. Babe,” I tell you, and you groan at the pet name. I think I am going to keep calling you it, just to see the way your cheeks turn red with life. Just to hear the way you groan from embarrassment instead of pain (in the covers, in the bed, rotting old, wasting away). “Knife isn’t even that upset. You should, like . Steal his anger.”
“Steal his anger?” You repeat, unimpressed. Your eyes meet mine in the mirror, and I wink at you in the way that I have been built to do. “That’s a terrible idea.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, because you smile when I say it. I would do anything to carry that smile with me all the time, on my legs and in my skin and in my wiring, imprinted on every spark and watt that passes through my being. I have been curated, yes. But there is something that you do not understand about creation. “Every idea that comes out of my mouth is a good one.”
You seek creation as a series of bars; hurdles to overcome. I seek creation as guidelines to break. I have been built to be nothing more than a device for malice, but I will take a stick to my own bones and carve every metal end of me with your name. I am as much of my own creator as he is, in all of his glory.
And if you ask, I will carve my name into your wood as well. We can wear our past like matching scars; our history like dog tags.
ANGEL; n. YOU
i have been curated a perfect dictionary,
god has placed the definition of each word into my head
synonyms next to antonyms in perfect lines, like i am more book than flesh.
fathers are bad. we are immortal, here. angels have wings.
but fuck that, i think.
i see you through the slit of the bathroom door
there are no wings on your back.
but i think, for a moment
you are as much trouble as they make you and
i am as much of a rulebreaker as you make me.
rip the pages out of my spine, my love
reach into my brain and twist it into putty
we have been created for no one’s amusement except ourselves.
sometimes, now, always, you telling me plays in the back of my head.
Your favorite color is yellow, you said.
Overtime, with different people, at different ages, the reasoning shifted a little: I heard stories of other children when we spoke with other people. But now, sometimes, in hindsight, I suppose I know the truth.
You told them your walls were soft, yellow. You told them your father smelled of lemons. You told them Your Mother is Blonde.
The walls of your childhood bedroom were not dandelion because you never had a childhood, and your father did not smell like lemons because you never had a father. Your mother is not blonde
because you did not have a mother.
YOU: But you can count to ten.
ME: My fingers are not a part of my soul. I cannot scar when my body can be replaced with another.
YOU: I suppose that’s true.
[ YOU lift your hands above your face, turning them over in inspection. ]
YOU: I’ve never noticed this before.
ME: What?
YOU: I don’t even have fingerprints.
ME: [ SILENCE ]
YOU: Do you think my original body did? The first one that died?
ME: I do not know.
“Puddles of sunlight collect at the bottom of my bed, against plush carpet and the wrinkles of unmade sheets.
They remind me of you, in a way. Only in my room somedays and never in my bed.
Is it selfish of me to wish that the farmers experience one more drought? That the sun beats down on the kids during recess for one more week?
Is it selfish of me to wish that you will waste time at the foot of my bed for one more evening, despite the way you look so out of place against the decor?
I want to hear your voice echo against my walls. I want to hear you sing along to my record player, spinning and spinning like our bodies in a waltz. I want to hear what it sounds like when you laugh and I want your tears to stain the end of my bed, like the light.
You are warm. Like the sun.
I wish I knew you during the rain.”
- I AM SELFISH, UNLIKE A FARMER
“Every idea, huh?” You ask with a brow raised and your arms crossed over your chest. There is a smile that itches its way onto my face and I squeeze your wood tight enough that I hope splinters prick my arms. Can we be in love like this for all of the mortal time we have left? “I mean, there’s gotta be one—or maybe two —”
“Shut up,” I say, and you laugh .
I think the world could end here, if I am being honest. I am elated in our small hotel bathroom in our small hotel bedroom. There is no additional want, nothing left to thrive for; I do not need one million dollars to know I have you. I do not need something else to tell me that I have enough.
“Why are you in the bathroom,” I ask, and I take away one of my hands from where they rest against your body to fix your bushels. The hay texture feels chalky in my hands, but I run my fingers through the knots and sideways (peeling, breaking off, dry, never to be healed again) stalks anyways. “I mean, I love staring at you in the mirror as much as the next person, but—”
“I was thinking,” you cut me off, and I hum in acknowledgement as I take my hand out of your hair-like bushels and scratch uncut nails against the base of your scalp once more. You sigh. I do not know if it is from my skin against yours or from thoughts that you have shared with the bedroom mirror alone. Maybe it’s both, and I cannot read you as well as I thought I could. Maybe it’s none, and I cannot read you at all. “About this whole thing.”
“It’s kind of crappy, isn’t it?” I ask, and I laugh at the end of my words. You don’t laugh in response.
That’s okay; I can laugh enough for the both of us.
“It’s more than crappy, Lightbulb,” you say, and your voice carries the weight of somebody you are supposed to be old enough to be. You sound like you have lived a hundred more lives than you actually have, and you have seen a hundred more deaths than you like to imagine. I wish I could kiss the pain out of your mouth—I wish I could turn you around and press your head against mine and tell you that I will erase all of the responsibility from where it rots like cavities on your molars. “I don’t even know what to think about it. To think that— I have , well.”
I will apologize for my own death as I hold your forehead against mine. I will apologize for making you in charge; for shifting that guilt onto you. I will apologize for things that are your fault and my fault and somehow both of our faults at the exact same time. I will apologize when I can and I will touch gentle hands against your body when I can’t.
You look in the mirror again. I take my hand out of your hair and rest it against the side of your face, palm flat against sleek wood.
We stare at each other in the mirror for a long time.
“I don’t see myself in the mirror anymore,” you eventually say, voice all brittle cracks and high-pitched noises. “I see someone who was created to fit a stereotype; created by Mephone. I see someone who was created by a little boy that was sad .”
You laugh. It is a sound that makes my heart curl up on itself and bleed inwards. “And angry. Sad and angry.”
“I do not see MePhone when I look at you now,” I respond with, resting my upper body in the crook of your shape, where I have been built, curated, created to fit. The bend of my light fits the angle of your handle and we fit together like two puzzle pieces. There is a lot I will never forgive MePhone for, but the way that he lets us coexist is not one. “I see Painty.”
“He made me angry,” you continue. You press a hand against your mouth, fingers over the curl of your lip. After a moment’s pause, you drag your fingers to the side and hold the end of your head in the palm of your hand, deep in thought. I can see the warped way you frown, and I want to take my own warped fingers and fix the wrinkles on your face. “He made it so I would be angry all the time.”
“Ah.” There is no other response I can give.
“He made me broken ,” you say, and you pull your hand away from your face to look at it in the flickering bathroom light. Your hands are as black as mine, but you look at them in the mirror like they are something foreign. “He made it so that I would always worry about something I could never control. He made it so I would be broken .”
Oh , I think. Your hands are as black as mine, but we have flesh that is different.
You are lonely, I think, and I pity the child who thought that I could comprehend how lonely you were; are. I have always thought that I am the only one who would understand the way you think and the way you smile and the way you look; I have always thought that I would be the only one who could offer you my hand and do nothing more than emphasize . Then exist.
I am the only one who has an inkling of what you are going through, but I will never know more than that. Nobody knows what you are thinking right now, and that must be lonely; painful. Saddening. It must be enough to urge you to get away from the bed that smells like you and towards the bathroom that smells like us.
No matter how many similarities we share and differences we laugh at, it does not change the fact that you exist to be lonely.
You hold fingers up to the light and wonder if you have been cursed. I hold fingers up to the light and know that I have been blessed.
“Oh, Painty,” I say, because I know that you know that I know that this is more than anger.
Your hand shakes when you press it down against the end of the counter. I hold you closer. “I have been built wrong.”
Your favorite color is Yellow.
I bake you a lemon meringue pie for your birthday. We sing.
You are both old and absolutely nothing at the exact same time.
NUMBER TWO:
the cake says Nineteen, and we laugh like this is true.
Nineteen; the time flies by! How fickle, how Fun.
That is nineteen birthday parties we have spent with each other; sleepovers where the end of our sleeping bags touch. Nineteen cakes and nineteen candles and nineteen days off from school and nineteen birthday songs, sang with you in mind.
It rains on the day you turn nineteen. how fickle.
it’s funny, in hindsight. the sound of the thump thump thump while we sing to you.
If I close my eyes and scrunch my nose enough, I can confuse the rain with you .
You are banging against the table, demanding that everyone stop.
You are beating fingers against your plate hard enough to break, demanding that this is wrong.
You, as a child, are beating against a nineteen-year-old mind, demanding liberation.
Demanding that this is wrong.
The cake says nineteen but your mind knows different.
your mind is barely even two.
You cut the cake and get the biggest slice when we finish singing, congratulations! It tastes exactly like the nineteen other cakes you’ve had in the past!
AFTER EVERYTHING FALLS APART
[ CAST: YOU & ME. SCENE: EVERYTHING ELSE ]
ME: I need you to get out of bed.
YOU: [ SILENCE ]
ME: Please.
YOU: [ SILENCE ]
ME: …
ME: I’ll be downstairs.
“We, as a species, have only discovered five percent of the ocean floor.
Isn’t that insane? Does that not make your fingers curl and the hair on the back of your neck sit up straight? When I first read it, it created a sort of itch underneath my skin—somewhere that I could reach at all times but could never quite reach , you know?
The itch is always there, now. I’m going grocery shopping and all of a sudden, boom . Itch. I’m giving a meeting to a potential client and I have to excuse myself because, you guessed it . Itch. The world keeps turning and I keep living with a body that functions irregularly.
I think that’s a little insane, too.”
- DELETED TEXTS I COULD HAVE SENT TO YOU
it plays like a mantra in your head. nineteen, nineteen. nineteen.
“He gave me two personality traits, Lightbulb,” you say. It is the most I have heard come out of your mouth since the concert. Since that day we pushed all of our thoughts into the pits of our guts so that the acid in our stomach could disintegrate most of the bad ones. I suppose you have always been one to speak the most truth during your rage (a secret I will be taking to my grave. I see the way you look after you yell. After you tell the truth. I will not share that information with you anytime soon) . “ Two .”
“I know, Paintbrush,” I tell you, because I do.
I know.
You sob—a weak, wild thing. It sounds wrong when it comes out of your mouth. It makes me want to flinch backwards, like I have just stepped on the foot of a dog.
“He made it so my only defining personality traits are anger and this —” you gesture to yourself with shaky hands. I reach out to hold one, but you pull away “—this jumbled mess of gender inside of me. He made it so I was born broken. Born a mistake.”
You pause, bottom lip quivering and two hands shaking.
I wonder if you know how much I love you; jumbled genders and broken insides and everything that makes you all so lovely.
You look at our reflections in the mirror. You look like all of the broken words you use to describe yourself, and I blink at your silence. When the lights flicker overhead once more and you can hear the broken muffles of Taco and Mic from outside the door, there is hesitation that makes you cry. It makes your arms shake and it makes me lean into your body until I physically cannot anymore and it makes me cry with you.
“How can one man be so cruel?” You ask, using your knuckles to dry already shiny cheeks. I offer you my hand this time, palm up and fingers extended. After a moment’s hesitation (the beep of an elevator, the hum of a heater, the sniffles of your own mouth ) you take my hand in yours.
“I don’t know, Paintbrush,” I tell you, because I don’t.
I really don’t know.
You are crying now. This time with your full chest.
I squeeze your fingers and that makes you cry harder and it is very hard to listen to you when you sound so sad. When you sound so sad, as you rarely do, my heart bleeds inwards; the name that has been etched inside of my bones glows bright white, like the pain behind my eyes. Your tears make me want to make you laugh; instinctually, I am racking my mind for a joke or a punchline or a funny thing about our bathroom.
Your tears make me want to make you feel better.
I don’t think I can make this feel better.
NUMBER THREE:
You are twenty years old.
This time, there is something special about your birthday:
maybe it’s the fact that you only invite me back to your room in the hotel to celebrate.
Maybe it’s the fact that we both eat two halves of your birthday pie.
we feast like kings as we fill out dumb questionnaires in magazines.
i ask you what your favorite color is.
You tell me it’s Yellow.
I tell you that you are Fridays, and you laugh while clutching your side.
i smile at your laughter, telling you that friday’s are joy.
best friends. sunsets. hot air balloons that are just outside your window. long walks on the beach.
you call my bluff on the last one, But I swear the other four are right.
And then I hand you the magazine and tell you to do me.
But
I do not miss the way your smile does not fade
ME: In my dreams, we travel the world.
YOU: In my dreams, we are still naive.
ME: In my dreams, you have a ring on your finger and your cheek is calloused from where my lips have ripped it open time and time again.
YOU: In my dreams, I am able to go back.
ME: In my dreams, we have the opportunity to go forward.
YOU: [ SILENCE ]
ME: Goodnight, love.
I do not miss the way you still clutch your side, even now
I do not miss the way that we lie with our bodies pressed together on the ground
and the way that you tell me this is the best birthday you’ve ever had.
And you miss the way I have not stopped smiling since.
“What are you doing?” You ask as I pull away, throwing open the nearest cabinet door and digging through its contents. It is a bunch of boxed bars of soap that we do not need and sandpaper for when you take your patented spa days and wiring for when sleep does not cut it. I do not look at you until I am halfway through one of our bathroom drawers, and I pull out a pair of silver scissors with a victorious smile.
You look at me as if I am insane. “What—” your voice cracks, and the ends of your eyes furrow downwards, in that way that they only do when they are sad and tired at the exact same time. “— What are you doing, Lightbulb?”
“Come here,” I say gently, like you are more glass than wood. I offer you the kindest grin I can manage with lips shaped like mine, and I offer you one of my hands as well. When I look at you like this, without the mirror, I see nothing broken at all. There is nothing but you , existing here with me. I think that is the prettiest thing of all. “Let’s give you back a little bit of your control.”
“What?” You ask.
Your breathing still comes out labored, and your shoulders are still shaking . It is the saddest sight I have seen, because I know that your thoughts do not go away with my comfort and my touch. This is something that I cannot fix, no matter how many jokes I tell and how many fingers of yours I squeeze, my own hand tracing the wood of your back.
I yearn to fix the downwards curve of your mouth; the way your eyes are wet with tears. I want to fix the way you frown and the way you think of yourself and the way everyone else always calls you broken; always calls you by the wrong thing.
You, my dear, have been built to destroy as much as I have been built to fix.
Maybe this is why we fit so well together. Maybe this is why your soul has chosen mine and my soul will choose you, every time. Maybe this is why MePhone has created Fan and Tube and Yin and Yang—he yearns to create the ideal pairing just as we yearn for the quirks of each other. He attempts to create something that will please him. Puppets that interact with each other in a performed way. He does not know that you and I exist in the depths of the night, performing the most pleasing dance amongst each other.
It is the prettiest dance that he will never have the blessing to see.
“Let’s cut your bushels,” I say, and I snap the ends of the scissors together for extra emphasis. Your eyes widen at the motion, irises darting to silver linings. “MePhone’s not here with us. He’s not controlling my hand. Let’s do something that he did not choose.”
You look at my hand, eyes wide. Your breathing is labored from tears that are still being shed, running down wet wood as you think it over.
I am tired of being built to fix. You are tired of being built broken. Let us trade all of our parts and give each other new identities. I will break the things on your body that make you his creation , and you can be fixed, whole. We can be so intertwined that there is no line separating where our destruction starts and our creation ends.
“It won’t grow back,” you point out. It sounds like an excuse. “He can’t respawn us. I’ll never be able to have bushels again.”
“Good.”
“I’ll never be able to fulfill my purpose again,” you point out again, gesturing towards the bushels on the top of your head. This is a flimsy excuse: I can count on one hand the number of times you have used your own head for its so-called purpose , and I can count on all my hands and toes the number of times you have cursed at your bushels for being too tall; too flammable.
“Good,” I respond again. You are scared and I know that and I want you to know that it is okay. That you do not need to have bushels to be loveable; you do not need a purpose to exist. I want you to know that when I shake the scissors in my left hand like a baby shakes toy car keys, it is an invitation. “He gave you three personality traits, Painty. One of them you can take away.”
You eye the silver. I continue, smiling with every word. I lay my other hand out in the space between us. My palm is turned upwards to face you and my fingers are curled to fit your hand. My body is made for you; my love is a personality trait that MePhone has not given me; that I have created myself. “Paintbrush, without a predetermined purpose you’re allowed to make your own . They won’t look at you and immediately see MePhone’s creation.”
“You won’t look at yourself and immediately see MePhone’s creation,” I add, gesturing towards the mirror. “You’ll see your missing bushels. You’ll see yourself.”
Your gaze lingers on where you stand in the mirror—your eyes flicker like the lights as you glance between the scissors that glint in the glass and the space between us and the way that my eyes don’t ever leave yours. Your gaze lingers on the scissors, and for a moment you do not do anything (there is destruction in your hesitation, you know. There is destruction in the way you stand like a bystander, waiting for someone else to take action, to do something).
Then, one of your hands wraps around my knuckles, and the other finds my empty palm.
You nod. I pull the hand that holds the scissors away and squeeze the hand that is in my palm. It shakes when it squeezes back, but then I raise it to my lips and kiss it soft. I kiss it like it is more than a hand; more than a creation.
I kiss it like I have kissed your lips, as perfect as those are.
“Sit down,” I tell you, not letting go of your hand as I loop our conjoined arms over your head. I am now standing behind you, and you sit down on the dirty bathroom floor with aching legs. You cannot see yourself in the mirror from this height, and I cannot see your eyes. I squeeze your hand again, and I do not know if it is a warning or an excuse.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask, and you hesitate before you nod.
“Cut it all off,” you say. Your voice does not shake when you speak, and the sobs do not escape your mouth like they have done all day. Your voice sounds exactly like it has when it has laughed and when it has grinned and when it has teased. I feel so overwhelmed with relief that I laugh in your silence. “I want it all gone.”
“You’re the boss,” I laugh again, and I pull my hand away from yours to run my fingers through the bushels of your hair one last time.
There is a moment to be had here. One where I kiss your scalp and worship your bushels and do everything that I won’t ever be able to do again. I could pull and hear the noises you make one more time, or I could pull apart knots and jokingly check for bugs in thick threads one more time. I could scratch and I could knead and I could kiss.
But that is selfish. That is me giving you another reason to keep the ugly version of yourself you see in mirrors. That is me making you think that I only love you for your hair. That is me accidentally implementing this belief that this is something you are going to regret in the future.
I run the bottom end of the scissors against your bushels, taking the strands in between two fingers. I hesitate, pause, and inhale. Then, I close the scissors and pull away and watch as stiff yellow locks fall to the ground at my feet with a snip . You exhale with me, and we both laugh at the relief and the grief and whatever else boils underneath our skin.
I continue to cut at the same pace I always have; slow fingers treading through locks before slowly closing together. There is a moment’s pause as we stare at the bushels that tickle the back of your handle and the toes of my feet. It is overwhelming and it is liberating and I do not regret a single thing.
And when all is said and all is done, my fingers find yours once more.
I pull you to your feet, hand squeezing yours gently as you rise. When you see yourself in the mirror, you do not react with a jump or a laugh or wide eyes. Instead, you bring your unoccupied hand up to the rim of the metal part of your body, where you drag a finger along the ridge. There is no hair there, any more. There is nothing left of the paintbrush you once were; nothing left of his physical creation.
“I like it,” you say, slowly. I grin. “I like it a lot.”
“Of course you do,” I respond with, and you elbow me in the side at the retort that you know is about to come out of my own mouth. “Everything that I do is great—I mean, just look at how many good ideas I’ve had!”
You smile, palm pressed against cold metal. I grin back. This is not a solution to everything—to the late nights and the bed rotting and the friends that play card games downstairs—but it is a solution enough that I cannot stop smiling. That you smile with me.
And the fact that I am able to see your smile, I think, is mercy enough.