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4:45 p.m. - November 05, 2001 Only if it's the right human, at the right time, under the right circumstances, and if they're putting their hands on you back, and only if you want them to.. which is why heaven is such a seldom-found ideal while on earth. The odds are against it. There's such a difference between brushing hands in the hall with someone you don't know and don't want to know, and brushing hands with someone you desperately want to get to know, or someone you already truly love, but so painfully that it still may be heaven, but a very bittersweet, aching heaven. A small touch can either be more than enough or not nearly enough at all... just a taste of what you want and usually can't have. Now try and say that heaven is perfect... Prompt of the week 10/17: I don't know, I didn't write it down. Abstract prompt, beware of lack of ideas. I don't want anyone else to have this, even if I don't particularly want it myself. Common sense tells me I would be better off avoiding the entire issue, staying the fuck away, making sure to use college as an excuse to be far far away from the issue itself. Preferably across-the-country different, or else I won't be able to forget that chance everybody else had that I never did, that the issue itself chose not to give me, because, I don't know, I'm a water buffalo or something (and that doesn't refer to weight, just clumsiness and awkwardness) but enough, enough to distance me. Prompt of the week 10/4: 'Describe the color of an emotion.' My bad moods are always some shade of gray, cliche as that may sound.. nausea, green gray, anger, red-gray, and sadness is just very, very dark. Interesting to think how these tones of gray are also some of my favorite colors to see in artwork. I don't generally like art splotched with colo and bursting, rainbow-esque, across the page... I'd rather see black and white and gray shading, contrast and a generally gloomy tone quality. We did still lifes in drawing these last few weeks, with ebony and charcoal pencials, and the mannequin, arm, and glove looked so much better described by Liz's charcoal pencil than colorful yellow under harsh white lighting. When I touch things, I pretend my hands are colorblind. Prompt of the week 9/24: 'Write a story within a letter.' Dear who will never know, Even though you�ll never know, I�ll always remember you and think about how we should have been fairy lovers in a past life, holding hands and tumbling down waterfalls, breathing in bubbles of each other�s air to sustain us when we stayed too long under the stream. We should have been the sun and the stars, the twin cities, road-trippers through the mountains. We should have had the cliffs as our living room sofa, the lake as our bathtub, the ocean our swimming pool. I wonder why I always think of you and I in water together, floating and dipping our hair in when it got too hot, dripping wet and stretched out in a canyon, somehow, magically, far away from the ocean. Maybe we would have created our own water, powered it into existence through wishing on mountain sky stars. We should have been selfish with the stars, scrambling every night to find them and collect them under the folds of our cloaks before the other children of the world got around to wishing on them first, using them up. That selfishness I can see clearly even looking at us now; wrapped up in our own conflicting eyes, oblivious to your mother calling up the stairs; �Dinner-time.� I can feel all that and more through your green eyes filling with tears that night as we lay by the duck pond, my head on your chest, my hand on your hand on your stomach. Your heartbeat told me all these stories; stories of what we should have looked like underwater as fairies, the feel of your skin in summer, the feel of your skin through layers of cotton in winter. I try not to think about things you�ll never know, because it makes me sad. I try not to notice that you don�t notice the things that I notice about us, the things that we should have been. I even try to shelter you from it sometimes, the fear of it dawning in your face, the quick rush to curb it before it goes any farther. I know you don�t want to know what we should have been. You�re still looking for something better. I wish you could have seen us, I wish you could have been there during those times when you tilted my head back under a sparkling sky. I wish you could remember, even though I can see you don�t want to. I wouldn�t force you, which is why you�ll never know. Just don�t ever try and tell me that being close to you isn�t painful. You�ll never know. Prompt 9/23: 'The Sense Memory' Yexin�s room: the perpetual smell of old Chinese noodles and sunlight made gray from the dust on the window. The plastic shelf with naked Barbies and their clothes strewn all over, sometimes headless, sometimes colored purple or blue. Her yellow fluffy bedspread with the marching ducks and pink pillow. The painting of a horse near the window, eating grass with a background of a farmhouse. The one wood wall, the rest papered with white flowers, with dusty wood floors. The qhit rug by her bed, somehow pristine in the madness and chaos. That place where I would set up my sleeping bag when we had overnights, next to the blue chest of drawers and by the window with looked out onto the Lindo Mexico�s parking lot. Which brings me to.. Lindo Mexico�s Parking Lot The week before Yexin moved back to Hong Kong with her parents, I visited her for the last time. Her apartment was empty, packed away, and we didn�t want to see it like that, so we sat together on the stairwell between her apartment and Lindo Mexico Restaurant and bounced tennis balls off the walls, silently watching the sky. Yexin and I had recently gone apple-picking at an orchard in northern Wisconsin, so we had a basket of apples between us, but what do you say to someone who�s leaving the country when you�re nine years old and she chose you over your other best friend to come apple-picking with you? I had trouble fitting any words past the sour taste rising in my throat. Yexin was my best friend, and to a nine-year-old, that was everything. I couldn�t think about her being across an ocean. We would have to abandon our secret language; our special spying game we played on the playground; even the gymnastics class we took together on Tuesdays after school. I would never know when she finally learned to turn a handspring. She would never know when I finally overcame my fear of the balance beam. We rose from the stairwell eventually and started a game of catch in the parking lots with the tennis ball. She stood over by the lot entrance and I stood against the building. She didn�t want the sun to be in her eyes. Before long, it started raining, the kind of rain that wasn�t even strong enough to keep the sun from shining through. We kept on playing through it until a ball I threw went over a fence and across Maple Avenue. Yexin ran after it and I ran after her, crying suddenly, and knocked her to the grass next to the street. We rolled, over and over, and finally bumped to a stop next to an oak tree. I tackled her clumsily, half-hugged her, embarrassed by my streams of tears. �You can�t move,� I choked out, finally, ashamed even as I said it for being the first to crack. �You can�t.� She looked at me, her eyes black in the shadows of the leaves. There was a rainbow stretching over her in the sky, and for the first time, I didn�t care. I let her go, only because I was hanging on dead weight. She looked almost angry. �Look,� she said, �there�s a rainbow.� She shook me off farther. �Isn�t it pretty?� �You�ll come back, won�t you?� I asked. �I think it came to say goodbye...� �It�s not time yet.� She hugged me, reluctantly, and released me quickly. �I think we should let that be the last thing we watch together. Don�t come with me inside. Don�t look at everything that�s all empty.� �Not now...� my voice caught again. �I don�t want to leave.� �Well,� she said, looking me in the eye, �you don�t have to.� And she went inside, closing the door firmly and quietly behind her. My mother picked me up five minutes later, and the next time I came back, there were new green curtains in the windows and I was three years older, I was twelve. She never wrote me. I almost hated her, enough that I almost didn�t even miss her. She was the only person I ever knew who tried to say a less painful goodbye.
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