There’s a mother somewhere sitting on the roof with her baby cradled in her arms and they’re watching fireworks. His finger is stuck in his mouth because he is afraid of them, and every time the sky screams and shoots forth another spray of static color, like iridescent snow, he jumps, and holds onto his mommy tighter. “What are those?” He mumbles softly round his thumb, sucked to a rosy red. “Fireworks, baby.” He spreads her long hair round his shoulders like a shimmering blanket, wraps his small arms round her waist and neck. “Make them stop.” Shoves his face into her stomach and she takes his small shoulders and smiles at him, as the sky explodes in more snow and illuminates the wet tiles with rainbow paint. “How?” She raises her hands high, like a shrug, to show him how powerless those loving hands really were. “I can’t, baby. I can’t stop them.” He turns his head back and watches the colored fire spread across the black sky like careless paint. He learns today that Mommy can’t do everything.
It’s funny what happens when you grow up. When you were younger, that was your only dream. You would hide in your parents’ closets and clap your mother’s heeled shoes together; press your head along her soft red dresses and your father’s fancy black suits. You would sit on the creaking stair in the middle, close enough to the dining room so you could hear the laughing voices as they sang grown- up talk like a happy orchestra and the clinking of their glasses as they drank that fascinating crimson water, and yet far enough so you could quickly flee to your room if you heard Mother clicking to the staircase to check on you. And then suddenly, you’re grown up, and you have something called problems with something silly like money and work and you suddenly experience something called family and pain. Then you wish you were like Peter Pan. You could be a hundred years old, and yet you still look little and you live with the stars and your only problem is a pirate who is afraid of clocks.
There was that girl that lived a few houses away from you. The one with the spider web hair and the rainwater eyes that looked like they would pour raindrops onto the cement below. She taped herself with band aids because she couldn’t hold herself up any longer, and when she dragged her bones slowly across the pavement she stopped every few seconds so she could drop them and move on again. If you watched carefully, you could almost count the bones she left behind; yesterday a knee cap, a fifth rib, a hipbone. She looked like she wanted to extract all the sunlight from every one’s skin as she watched little kids play hopscotch on the floor with purple sidewalk chalk and plastic hula- hoops. You don’t know what became of her. And most of the time, you really don’t want to, because maybe you could be the same.
You knew a woman once. Well, you never knew her of course, because you never talked to strangers, especially ones like her, but you saw her whenever you came into the bakery to buy that yellow dough your Mama used, to make her super soft bread on Sundays. She had white, white hair, that woman, with trembling hands and blue, blue eyes that always stared at the T.V screen in the corner. She never took her eyes off that screen, as she tried to see how many times she spelled that bad man’s name with the letters running quickly on the bottom, puking out bad news like a carton of spilt milk. You never let yourself think about it, of course, but you still thought about it. You always wondered if maybe she used to be sane.
My favorite thing to do when I was angry, or sad, was hop out my bedroom window and get on the bus that stopped every nine minutes at the corner by my house. I would sit at the farthest seat and breathe on the window until it grew gray with hot steam, and then I would trace my finger across the filmy warmth and draw my name or funny messages. Sometimes I would draw a heart, and hope somebody would see it and love me back. I would draw in careful script and then realize that nobody could read it because my forward would be their backward because that was how things were; the way you understood things was the way others misunderstood them. I drew faces, and flowers, and traced the buildings when the bus stopped. Or when I was really sad, I would write Help Me and then erase it with my elbow so nobody would see.
There was that really rainy day when you forgot your umbrella, and you ran to take cover under the donut shop with other huddling men and women in their long trench coats and wet hair. You saw an old man that day, who didn’t want to hide with you and the others. He just sat on the dirty sidewalk with his crooked hands in his lap and his spine bent like a hook. A suitcase was nestled between his thighs and he let the rain stream down his face and pool in his many wrinkles and gather in his white beard. When he looked up at the sky, your felt your heart break, even though you didn’t know his sadness, and you wondered, if maybe he was beautiful once.
You liked lying in empty bathtubs and staring at the ceiling. You liked tracing your finger across the blue veins mapped on your arm. You liked to take your hair in your hand and slowly cut it with scissors, listening to that dry sound as your hair curled slowly to the floor like dead butterfly wings. You fantasized about death, and you thought about drugs, just because you were always taught against it and it gave you a thrill to think of it. You watched your baby sister as she hugged your knees and kissed your hands and you pat her hair and remembered how you used to be happy too, until you met boys and their heart traps, and saw broken people on the streets with purple fingers and sad eyes. She would tell you she wanted to be just like you, pretty like you, and you would smile at her and read her a book and then wonder inside what made you grow up and wither and stop seeing magic beyond rusty ashtrays and psychedelic colors and people shouting. You didn’t want her to be like this. So you sang her songs and held her hand and braided her hair and never cursed in front of her, or taught her words like bad and hurt and even love, but she learned it all herself anyway. You wanted her to keep the strawberries in her cheeks and the magic in her fingers, and it made you cry so hard that time she threw away her Teddy because she was too old.
There’s a man who is normal on the outside and lonely in his heart. Every night he lies alone with ivory skin shining in the pale moonlight. His sad, hazel eyes watch the pools of street lamp lights glittering by the window, as his hands line an empty bedside. He wonders, only because he cannot remember, Maybe he had loved once?
Somewhere, a teenage girl falls in love for the first time with a tall boy who paints pretty pictures with his words. And then the night turns black as the girl screams at her mother, who only tried to warn her; “You’re just a machine! And you can’t feel anything at all! You have no heart!” And then her mother’s tongue turns to ice because she knows it’s true. But in a week, he leaves her for another girl and she is heartbroken, so her mother takes to the hill by the house, arms crossed against the wind, and they sit together to watch the cracked egg paste of the bleeding sunset above the dark trees, as the girl thinks the synapses of her desire. “I loved him. I really did.” She whispers, and leans a cheek against her mother’s quiet shoulder, and her mother feels her own heart break with her daughters, and the silence of her words fills with the splintering crack of breaking hearts. “I know.” Her mother fingers the loose earth beneath her jeans as the girl’s hair curls at her palm. “I know.”
Somewhere, a couple argues bitterly over something they forgot. Glass shatters, spilling crimson wine over the floor like blood and they cry and embrace. A mother and her baby see each other grow and hate and love and grow more. A little girl watches two raindrops as they race down her sparkling window, and smiles as the one she has been counting on, wins. A dog wags his tail and barks with pure, everlasting joy as his master returns from work, just to show that he will never forget him. People who jump from buildings fly back up and continue walking and learn to smile, men snorting drugs sneeze out white plumes of dust and come back home, and abandoned babies are picked up by smiling mothers from the harsh snow and taken back home to be cradled by the fireplace. And the people who suffered? You grow up thinking about them forever, and wondering, that maybe you will see them again. Happy.
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