okay, i've decided to head back to this piece, which i want to make. you know. it's still just a random freeflow outline thingamajig that i like coming back to.

but a note: this story is shaping up to have the following dedications / acknowledgements, among many others. thank-you to Sarah, Selah, and Tahina for the stories I have robbed and blatantly bastardized for my own fictional ends. If you mind, tell me and I'll mull it over. (hugses)

(it is thundering outside... a strange break from the snow)

This section is back to narrator 2, Sparrow.

***
Six and a half days left, and I have locked myself in to put it to words. Clear and needful articulation.

Inside, the myelin has been under attack. I can feel it in the slow acts of balance. I spend my time looking for a form of coordination.

I take a twig of chalk, a twig broken from ground with assurance of other soils to root in. The root of this strange language, the root of all words and drawings and acts that which will lift us on up past primordial stupor. I take the twig and mark a line on the floor of my hostel. This side, that side, me in the middle like a drunk trying to convince someone. Trying to fool.

On one side: the history.

On the other: the spider that still crawls from corner to corner; my skin, numb on the thigh; my tummy all full and round from the salad I heaped high with tomatoes and tuna fish and four squeezed cubes of lime; the cat hairs that float around the room from the breeze that drifts under my door and carries scent of the mad hostel woman with her five cats that prowl and strip the walls of mice and spiders; the thrum in my uterus, somehow excited by the fever that carries me along; the sound out the window—at night, brawling crescendos of prostitutes and johns, and during the day, the cry of cars as they turn corners; the scent of things ripe, dusty tuna full and the kilo of strawberries I bought at the open market, heating next to the window, and escaping their bag.

On one side: health.

On the other: demyelination, or the stripping of callous from the innards of me; the memory of then and stichings and all the fallings apart, like my life is a patchquilt always incomplete.

On one side: my family.

On the other: that moment when I realized I could do no more, that I had no more to give, that everything had run dry and echo and full of fossilized desire; the solitude of me as I make my way again through the foreign-open to find gift in just the slightest of smiles on a dark African’s face; my choices, my self-help; embracing drunkenness from my wine bottle as I make my own.

I walk down the line, toe-heel, toe-heel.

I will find balance again, even with my body warring with itself, the internal mechanisms of safety turning on the very objects that coordinate this body. How many diseases exist where the body hates itself. How many, let us count.

--
My brother Gustafo, the eldest, has a disease the negative of my own. Whereas mine is overprotective and self-loathing, his is underprotective and indifferent. If only we could have inoculated ourselves against the mechanisms of our bodies.

How could we have fallen this way, this huge beast of burden our parents have flogged around the world like gypsy ramblers without the solidarity of mysticism? Couldn’t we have been birthed from the channels of those who carry violins and fabrics and wheels on their cars?

Gustafo would answer, we are what we are. He has to cling to that, because for him it is true. He cannot go back and instead must embrace what came of his own indifferent actions. The oldest brother is never like the oldest daughter.

I am not the oldest daughter in years. The oldest sister, Cedra—who is older technically by four years and older technically by many lives and younger technically by capacity—lives in a string universe, one with no umbilical cords to wrap around a fetus’s throat. In our universe, she gathers socks in her room, knots them into balls, and then snips out the interims with her scissors. When they open like webbed feet in the air, we all admire but wonder. What is it about absence that obsesses her? Her paintings speak for her, the paintings of faces she has seen. Green stretches like wastelands, purple sockets like violets. They speckle our houses with the innocent replay of time itself. Sometimes I wonder if she’ll ever be able to live outside the strange foreplay of our family’s boudoir.

But it all came down to this fact: Gustafo and I were the eldest—he the eldest brother, and I the eldest sister.

I miss his unique sensitivity.
I miss so much about him.
I feel estranged and full of a hatred I could only call guilt.

“I can’t,” I told him. “I just can’t do it.”

In other words, I stranded him. I let him down. I abandoned him when he needed me most. I am a betrayer, and my body speaks this truth.

--
Once—I believe it was in Belize—we were playing dolls by the river.

“And she’ll wear this gown,” Gustafo told me.

The dress should have been white but was splotched with brown refuse and a little spritz of decomposed leaf. At the time, I wanted to believe that weddings were pure, a signal of the great interaction. The one. A great sweeping gown full of wedding. The one great interaction. But really, the dress spoke for itself.

“No,” I told him. “She should be naked. Just like Eve.”

He thought about it. This was visible on his face.

He was a boy with religion inside him. He liked the idea of things not falling, of apples unplucked. For a second, I thought he really must be a boy. The things I had noticed weren’t really true. If he could embrace the wedding of a nude barbie doll, an Eve of plastic asexuality (I had drawn a bush on her hips just because I knew she was old enough, but this didn’t really change her forlorn reality), then maybe he was male afterall. Surely only a man could believe in a life where the apple wasn’t meant to be eaten. Although I had protested, I still believed the soiled white gown was meant to be worn. It spoke for itself.

“No,” he told me. Full of knowledge, the truth of himself. The apple meant to be eaten because it was rich and ripe and bittersweet and red (oh, thank god for red apples). “She needs the dress. We can accessorize with a flower.”

He didn’t really say accessorize, but I imagine it that way. He was who he is.

--
I was still unable to deal with his reality. I couldn’t accept that he had to fit into the words spoken by so many prickish judging pundits on the radio. It wasn’t fair. I wanted him perfect and male and not the oldest sister, but the oldest brother. I didn’t want him sick. I needed him. I couldn’t take more than I had already taken, or so I believed. I didn’t want a gay brother with an immune disorder that would lead to his death. I wanted him to defy everything, everything we had ever been given. Everything that fell down, everything that was plucked, everything. I wanted him alive and with me. I wanted him to accessorize me, to carry me around with him like the shine on his diamonds. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t accept.

But as a result: Where was he? What was he left with? A city, a place full of not-family, of people who would give him pills tested in Africa, but only if he could keep going and find money, and I was the eldest daughter.

Surely I was destined to be beside him.

--
I walk the line I draw on the ground of this fine but barren hostel. The breeze comes in through the window and under the door and my pet spider scurries along to keep me malaria-free. I don’t think malaria exists in this country, but just in case, I keep my friend the spider.

Sometimes when I walk from the north wall to the south, I stumble. That’s just the truth of where my muscles are right now. They don’t know themselves, or maybe they know themselves too familiarly. It’s hard to see whether the result is from one or the other. Or maybe neither; maybe it’s just me telling stories, speaking too much, seeing patterns where none exist.

If I’m to become a self-help guru, surely this is something I should know.

When I get tired of the line, I make it a few. Crissity-cross and I toss a piece of the crumbling wall along the brick and play hopscotch. I remember playing hopscotch with Neecie, my baby.

She’s not really my baby, but she’s one of the two that knows me. Not even Gustafo knows me. Neecie knows me, and so does Arshwin. I try not to think of Arshwin, he who was to me as I was to Gustafo. He is not real, anyways.

--
Neecie and I used to play hopscotch whenever we found ourselves in a city. We’d take a break from the camper and go outside and draw lines on the ground. Neecie would play along for a few minutes before she’d get bored and start writing. I could never interest her in playing out the game; she’d always become obsessed with the lines.

Crossing lines, drawing lines, writing across lines, writing on one side of lines, I miss her.

She was a wretched storyteller. Not wretched in the sense that she was bad, but wretched in that it became too easy to believe. She always had a framework to re-interpret, and I wasn’t sure this was a good thing or a bad thing. At night, she would come over to my cot and hover over me sometimes. I always woke up as soon as she moved, something suspicious or aware in me, but I never let her know. So, she’d hover for a long time and maybe she was dreaming, but then she’d climb into bed with me. And we’d wrap into each other.

When everything changes all around you, all the time, it becomes impossible to live without story.

That’s what scared me about her not playing hopscotch, but taking twig of chalk and writing all over the lines. Sometimes her words seemed more real that what seemed real.

Excavation, she wrote.

What’s the name of this city, she wrote. And who is my new imaginary friend?

Sparrow doesn’t look like me, she wrote. That’s because I’m adopted.

But she wasn’t adopted. She is from us. We are from her. My family really is the way it is, and even if I’m far away in a hostel, trying to coordinate between the moments when I work around these new towns, explain English words to people who want to brutalize it with business, and the moments when I work as an itinerant field worker, I am still from my history. I am still who I am.

Self-help rule: find the root.
Self-help rule: inside us lies time.
Self-help rule: we are what came before.

I walk the line, I try to find balance. I’m not sure I can go there, to this side or that side. Finding yourself in decision (indecision) is the most perfect horror of all.

--
But I am happy here. In this hostel, walking this line. I am safe with white twig in hand. There is no safety in memory, no safety in what came before. But nevertheless, I think I can find something here. I feel like I can. I feel like… even if what came before contains fragments and half-truths, it still can come together. That’s the other truth of my disease: what is stripped from my axons can be rebuilt. Not always, but sometimes. I might find balance again, but then again maybe not.

But I am here. I am here in this place and my tummy is warm and the strawberries are on the sill and I have all the time in the world, six days, to get coordinated and to gather before the next move.