Dear light

You and I have had a rough relationship. You’ve been lacerating me for as long as I can remember. When I attended my first wedding you pressed so deeply into my five year old skin that it must have drawn blood and I couldn’t say how, but I thought those red petals might have been made of broken glass, the way they stung me. Looking back I see that it was really you. You were always making me bleed. Every time the sun sank exhausted to the horizon, recklessly anointing the earth with the last of its warmth, every time the night sky was mercilessly punctured by gleaming points, I was left breathless with pain. You didn’t need an entire sky, you know. A single blade of grass, in  your hands, is enough to leave bruises on my soul.

But, I have always been the one to use you. I kept you on my shelves. I posted you along my streets, left you out in the rain, just to keep me from getting lost. I stretched you thin across an entire continent and let you burn yourself out into the atmosphere, until they called you pollution. But, please believe, I just wanted you to be a part of every where I call home. Because, to be honest, I never want to lose the pain your loveliness has always created beneath my ribs.

we are pronouns

[this is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. Hope you all enjoy. does contain a mention of suicide—cory]

My sister and I used to talk about reporting. How a journalist could come back from a place like Afghanistan, having seen people torn in half by land mines from a war they had never even been born for, having watched buildings full of orphans or school girls erased in a puff of powderized brick and mortar. And yet they still call such places Eden. They fall in love with the place as it is dying.

    My sister did the same thing, I think, though what it was she fell in love with I’ll leave to others to riddle out. If there’s anything she taught me, it’s that we are pronouns.

               I came two years after my sister was born albino. No one had expected it. I’m told some albinos are born with red eyes, like mice, but hers were just brown. Mother was a Spanish major in college (she ended up working in real estate), and though they had already picked out Brooke for her, they decided on Albina as a name: a female albino, I suppose. Thus locking albinism into her identity, her most defining characteristic, a name givable only to someone who foremost lacks pigment.

               So I inherited Brooke. I was born to contrast my sister, I suppose. At birth, I already supported a curly mop of dark brown hair and olive skin. Dad still swears that it’s because of all the olive oil mom cooks with and hence ingested during pregnancy. Why Albina came out so pale given this is left to the universe. She once asked mother how much flour had been used in every meal leading up to her birth, which sent Dad and I guffawing and mother eye-rolling till she walked out. I remember Albina had turned around, shrugged a sad smile, and gone up to her room. Dad and I had stopped laughing instantly. There’s something about an introvert smiling that gives pause to even the most amused comedian, the beautiful carnage it seems to imply.

               Dad had names for us. Yin, he called Albina, and me he called Yang. I don’t know if he, or any of us, ever bothered to look up if he had got the coloration right. But it stuck like that. He’d call us in from playing horses or secret agent or on the tire swing by shouting, “Yo, Y-Girls! Dinner time!” in that tone that only a father has and only a daughter notices. I wonder at the fathers that have sons, or no children at all, their voices’ tones forever unnoticed. But our Dad’s was well regarded, though I only had this realization years later.

               We got along in our early years, as we did for much of our lives, though it was obvious from the start that I would be the outgoing, miniature adult and she the kid that brought a book to recess. Not to say that she wasn’t an outdoor house cat.

               I remember one instance (I must have been about nine or ten and she eleven or twelve) where she knocked on my door as I was building single-dimension starships out of legos.

               “Brooke,” she said, “I got a surprise.”

               “What?”

               “Well, it wouldn’t be a surprise then.”

               “Okay. Fine.”

               So I let her lead me outside, past Mother reading her magazine.

               “Where are you two going?” she asked, looking up. She had just had her hair cropped off into the middle-age-acceptance-graying-pixie cut.

               “Outside,” Albina said. “To play.”

               “Did you put sunscreen on?”

               “It’s just for a sec, Mom,” Albina said with that little whine that had been maturing into a sort of authority now that she was aged into double digits.

               “Okay,” she said. “Fine. Don’t stay out too long.”

               She led me out across the driveway to the far edge of the garage.

               “Hey, a trashcan,” I said sarcastically, just as Albina had started doing recently.

               “Smart-Alice,” my sister said exasperatedly, just as mother had started doing recently. “Give me a knee.”

               I propped my leg up from a kneeling position, and let her boost herself up, somehow noiselessly, onto the lid of the can. And then….

               “Albina!” I whispered harshly. “What are you doing?”

               “Shh!” she said. “You want mom to hear?” And with that she finished pulling her body over the lip of the roof and up onto the shingles. “Here,” she said extending an arm. “I’ll help you up if you can get on top of the can.”

               “Are you crazy?” I shrieked silently.

               “What’s gonna happen?” she teased. “Come on.”

               In the end, I gave in, piled a few cinder blocks and got on top of the can, and let her pull me up. She wasn’t exceptionally strong, but I wasn’t exceptionally large, so this wasn’t exceptionally difficult. I remember that nervous feeling, coming partly from the sloping nature of the roof to a dead end of house and a start of sky, and partly from the fact of ever-present neighbors’ windows facing us like the eye of Sauron. But Albina was a mountain goat in its natural environment. Together we watched the fading of the autumn sun in the west, something I’d learned from Girl Scouts. They wouldn’t take Albina because albinism was a disability.

               She must have noticed my nervousness. “What? Are you afraid?”

               “No,” I said.

               “Yes.”

               “Okay. Yes.”

               “I’m not,” she said. “I’m not afraid to die.”

               “Yes you are,” I said, scoffing the way a nine-or-ten-year-old does.

               “Well,” she said. “I will be.”

               That’s when the screen door slammed. I still remember the sudden sense of panic in those brown eyes of my sister. “Shi—oot,” she breathed, scrambling to the other side of the roof. I followed.

               “Okay,” I said, “We wait for her to go back in and then get back down.”

               Albina was silent.

               “Albina. We can get down.”

               She was still silent.

               Then: “We might have to jump…. Oh, God. I didn’t think about getting down.”

               “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” I said.

               She just stared at the ground in the back yard. If there was ever a moment she looked as fragile as that, I know it not. “Brooke,” her voice shook. “I’m sorry.”

               “He forgives you.”

               “I’m afraid to die.”

               “What?” I had honestly not understood her.

               “I’m afraid. To die,” she mumbled. I’m not sure who she was telling this to.

               We were up there another ten minutes waiting for mom to go back in. Albina wiped away her tears, hung by her hands till she could touch the can and let herself go, helped me down. To her credit, I didn’t hear her crying till she was in bed in her room, after Dad had pulled us aside to show us the shingles we had torn from the roof.

               “I’ll assume it was just an opossum,” he said, mischievously smiling. “This time. Even though they don’t live in this part of the world.”

    Dad was big into getting us out of the house. He always took us hiking just outside of town. It was he who bought us matching bikes and put them under the tree without talking to Mother about it, an incident that resulted in the great conniption that we still find unexploded ordnance from to this day. But, as with bowling, cross-country skiing, and a one-time horse riding escapade, I was the first to ride my bike, and Albina the first to forsake it to rust in the rain by the garage. I think maybe he understood why we’d gone up there. I think he always figured it was my idea. I always felt guilty for not telling him it was actually Albina’s.

By the time I was in middle school, she had grown paler, though I didn’t know such was possible. She basked around the house from sunlit patch of floor to patio to her room, which she seemed totally absorbed by once a month, something I didn’t really understand for another two years or so. By now there were guys on her walls, tanned, wearing baggy pants, surfboards in hand. Her jeans grew tighter each quarter she suffered in school. She was just a girl. Totally devoid of color. But a girl nonetheless.

              I must have been in fifth grade, when we were busy hefting a futon down the stairs into the spare bedroom, and we were talking about school, that I realized how little I saw of Ally, how few and far between these conversations had become.

               “What are you up to?” I asked rather suddenly.

               “I’m moving a futon downstairs,” she replied. “You?”

               “I mean generally.”

               She paused. “Stuff. There are some cute boys. But math is killing me. Do you think Dad would like it best by the window?”

               “Mother!” I hollered.

               “Don’t shout across the house!” she hollered back. I noted the irony.

               Once we had the futon on the ground floor, we ran to the kitchen, where mom was steeped in paperwork, in what we would later term “the mood”. But we were young and unwary then.

               “Do you think Dad would like the futon by the window?” I asked.

               Mother looked up. “I don’t know. I’m not him. He’s in his study.”

               So we descended into the basement floor.

               “You want the futon by the window?” Albina asked.

               Dad looked up, turning his head around from his own set of paperwork. “That’d be fine.”

               We put it by the window. Albina jumped down onto it and snuggled herself up in the blankets. “Morning to you,” she said. Then, “What have you been up to?”

               “Nothing.”

               “Boys?”

               I shook my head violently, as much reminding myself as her that I did not, would never like boys.

               “You’re going to want to kiss them,” Albina teased. “Or girls, which is fine.”

               I scoffed.

               “Trust me,” she said. “You will.”

               Most people have one doctor, maybe two. Albina had about seven. This time, it was a trip to the optometrist.

               “You lucked out,” he said, shutting the spider-eye device down and turning on the lights.

               “I know,” Albina said.

               “Thank God you got my eyes,” Mother said, flashing them like a heavily sequined scarf.

               The doctor nodded. “Might need glasses or contacts eventually. But no light problems. Just wear sunscreen.”

               “I wouldn’t let her forget it,” Mother echoed.

               As we walked out of the doctor’s office, Mother offered to buy us ice cream. We took her up on it.

    Ally paid for it later though.

    “You were only in the sun for a half hour,” Mother said, softly dabbing ointment onto a enormous blister on her back.

    “Ouch!” Albina winced.

    “Sorry,” Mother said, and then glanced at me. I think she was telling me in that glass that the apology had nothing to do with provoking a sun blister.

    “I know,” Albina said. I think she was accepting it.

    Someday, watch a mother tend a wound. It’s the most heartwarming thing imaginable, like watching as a woodcarver removes a bird from a block of walnut, but the only chisels used are bestowed by their children. Just like Mother gave Ally albinism, Ally gave Mother a child to raise. This was just the continuing mortgage on the exchange.

    Later, Ally knocked on my door.

    “Hey,” I said. “Taped up?”

    She nodded. “I get so sick of this.”

    “The burns?”

    “All of it,” she replied. “Being albino. Being fragile. And ugly.”

    I should have said something in that moment, but I think understanding her condition for me would have been like an Indian trying to imagine a cube in a world of circles. I was olive, she was white. I could play outside and go to the beach and watch fireworks and attract cute, simple boys. But for her, life was and would be a series of caveats, of yes-buts.

    “I just wish sometimes I was normal,” she spitefully bit. “That I wasn’t born.”

    “This way?”

    “Yeah,” she said, pausing, “This way.”

               I was washing the potatoes off with mom when dad came hold, took off his contractor belt, hung it up by the door, as usual. Mother could always sense how his day was just by the sound it made as he released it. “Rough one?”

               “Not anymore,” he said, leaning over me to kiss my part, then Mother’s cheek. “Potatoes make everything better. Your potatoes.”

               Mother smiled, washing. “Does Albina like sleeping on the futon still?”

               “I think so,” I said.

               “Why don’t we ask her?” Dad proposed.

               Mother flashed around. “She’s at Brandon’s house for dinner.”

               “Oh, isn’t that just like her?” Dad said, kissing Mother. I knew somewhere across town Albina and Brandon were probably doing the same thing. I had started having these really strange dreams about this guy in my math class who made up names for me like Creek-thing and River Runs Through It. I had told Mother it bugged me and she told me to ask him to stop if it really got to me. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do that. God, did Ally have to be right about everything?

               Then the front door slammed.

               “I don’t want any dinner,” Albina breathed on the way to her room. There was another slamming door. The silence that followed demanded that we three look at eachother, then go about as if nothing had happened.

               “Ally?”

               “What?”

               “Can I come in?”

               “No.”

               I went in anyway. She was propped up in her bed, not the futon, reading some arduous poetry manual. That’s what Dad called them, but Mother always said, “It’s her version of tinkering,” which shut him up. I could tell she wasn’t reading by the way her eyes stared straight through the book at the layers of the story to come. She was as interested in the next page, or the one that followed, or the sock fuzz between her toes as she was the page she was on. I knelt by her bed, and though she pretended not to notice, I too had been in this mood, and knew that lack of attention was attention.

               “What happened?”

               “What do you mean?” she bit.

               “Brandon?”

               She stopped, looked at me, then the book, then me. “You want to know what happened?”

               “What?”

               “He wanted to kiss me,” she said. “He tried. So I left.”

               I was bewildered. “Don’t you like him?”

               “Yeah.”

               “So… why?”

               “That’s why I’m mad as fuck,” she hissed.

               Shaking my head, “I don’t understand,” I admitted.

               She sank down into her bed further. Staring at the ceiling, she said nothing for a few moments, then, “You really have no idea about the futon, do you?”

               “You like sleeping down there,” I said.

               She scoffed. “Yeah. I like sleeping down there.”

               Another moment or two passed before I realized it was my turn to keep the conversation going. “I thought you said I’d want to kiss boys.”

               “Don’t you?” she asked pointedly.

               “…sort of.”

               She stared back at the ceiling. “Then that’s how we’re different.” She chewed something intangible in her head. “I’ve lied before.”

               Brandon came and went, but not before I caught them snogging in the TV room downstairs. I guess she had meant what she said after all. I had my own succession of boys too, starting with Ryan in sixth grade. I used to tease my sister about how it took her till eighth, but she just scoffed, turned her music back up, went back to doodling in the margins of whatever homework she had, and my repeated attempts to move her attention to me made me late for softball practice or whatever it was that time of the year. While I attended soccer camps, she doodled, listened to music. Thus was the routine we’d fallen into.

               Mother and Dad started arguing a lot too. Especially with Ally.

               “Look, hun, we need these grades to come up,” Mother would say. “Can you talk to your Earth Science teacher, see if he’ll let you retake that test?”

               “She already said he wouldn’t,” Dad chimed in. “Look, Yin, can you just try to do better? I know it’s hard, I hated earth science too—”

               “This is not what we talked about,” Mother would cut in. “She needs to learn to take this into her own hands and deal with it.”

               “I know, but a C’s not that bad,” Dad said. “It will come up if she just tries.”

               “So what has she been doing then? She isn’t slacking off, I’ve made sure of it. I’ve talked to all her teachers about part—”    

               “Whoa, you did what, Mom?” Albina interjected, then to Dad, “Did you know about this?”

               “He most certainly did,” Mother slid in calmly, “and he helped. We both feel very strongly about this. If you worked in science like you did in art and English—let’s not even start with math.”

               “Trudes, that’s a B-minus,” Dad would say.

               “So we need to watch it,” Mother would say.

    “Yin,—”

    “Mark. Can I talk to you in the basement for a minute? Ally, go do some homework.”

    We listened at the heating vent upstairs, which we had eventually figured out carried the sounds of discussion in the basement rather well.

    “We talked about this.”

    “You decided—”

    “We decided. When did it become a you-me thing? We’re co-parents.”

    “For godsake Trudes, she’s going to be eighteen soon. She can take care of herself. They both can.”

    “So we just step out of the way? I’m not cutting my kids loose.”

    “You’re cutting them down!”

    “You’re cutting us out!”

    “Maybe we’re not supposed to be there all the time.”

    “Mark. We are talking about grades. That’s a parent thing. You want to be a fucking best-friend, you depend on them liking you. It’s nice, but you got to show some tough love.”

    “I want them to be happy.”

    “I want the best for them.”

               It was painful to attend. Never mind that Ally was taking honors and I regular, never mind that I had found an empty prescription bottle in the trash for Celexa with Albina Brown on the patient ID, that it was her junior year. Never mind the walls of her room, once adorned with prints of Ryan Gosling were now coated in artwork, her desk a post-twister mobile park of paper saturated to bursting point with ink in her hand. Never mind how good we got at Egyptian Rat Screw, camping in each other’s rooms upstairs, flinching at shouts hurled in the war zone that had become the living room. The side that wanted the best for us flinging a spear at the side that wanted us to be happy.

“Brooke?”

“Yeah, Ally?”

“Don’t ever let me get married.” Then she slapped a sandwich. “Suck. It.”

    No longer was I Brooke. Not even Albina’s sister. I was “the albino’s sister.” That was how people, especially teachers, greeted me for the first time. I was forever scarred with a disease I didn’t even have. And I loathed her little white ass for it. I flat out refused to talk to her at home. I always took the last roll, especially if she hadn’t had one yet. I made sure to flush the toilet at night; it was right next to her room. Anything she asked, I answered with a shrug. I read instead of playing Rat Screw

Then came a Wednesday. I went out to the rain-painted car at lunch to blast away the fog of tests and friend drama, found her sobbing, felt that deeply healing pang of sympathy that one needs on rainy Wednesdays, opened the door to the passenger seat, sat down, started the engine, got the heat blasting, forsook fifth period. Hard to believe, but watching an albino warm up is like watching an artist put paint to canvas. The red spreads from their cheeks out across their face, refracting off the mouth and nose, pooling in the dimples.

    “Jesus fucking Christ, I’m albino,” she cried. “I’ve got depression, all my friends have lost their virginity, I suck at anything I don’t care about, like math, I failed another test, and Mother’s gonna flip when I need her support and Dad’s gonna try and be my friend when I need him to be angry, cause I can brush my teeth but I can’t pay the dentist’s bill….”

    Albina said things like that more and more now days. I think she was a nihilist. But scared of it rather than invigorated by it. The way some people are afraid of God.

    Then she said something: “I almost picked a light-pole this morning.”

    If ever I doubted that I was capable of love, compassion, sisterhood, such shadows were shattered in that moment. Soon we were both sobbing.

    And before I knew it we were laughing. Really really hard. I think we actually had to wipe all of our snot and salt and spit off the console and dash afterwards. My abs hurt for days.

    “Are—we!—really?—”

    “Yeah!—we—are—really—!”

    I couldn’t even tell who was saying what.

Finally it subsided to dull coughs every five seconds or so. And she turned to me and said, “What the fuck was that?”

Just a touch of nihilism. If an albino and an olive branch could go from suicidal to beyond what any texting lingo could describe laughing, God must be dead. And that was how I learned the stark difference in taste between tears of depression and laughter.

Near the end of Ally’s senior year, her grades suddenly began falling and consequently she hit a tree while driving.

A’s had become B’s had become C’s. It was very confusing to explain. At first it just seemed a typical case of senioritis: she’d already been accepted to study English and art at the college across the hills. She’d worked herself to death all through her school life, it was natural for her to be getting a little lazy. But the further we watched the grades drop, the more time she seemed to spend in her room, hunched over textbooks, to the point that she became the ghost that haunted our house. We saw her at dinner and breakfast, sometimes late at night if she was coming back from friends’ houses or up brushing her teeth, staring at her night-lit reflection in the mirror.

I asked her about this once, when I caught her in the bathroom, not a light on, staring at herself.

“Have you seen the way night lights a scene up?” she said. “The darkness can be so bright sometimes.”

“So you’re up at three in the morning to watch yourself in a mirror because the darkness is bright?”

She paused. “Yes.”

Then, “I’m memorizing it.”

I didn’t realize she meant her reflection as well as the bright shade that pervades the air of a house at night.

There were other things. Sometimes she’d call my friends, or hers, by the wrong name. She’d pass the salt when the pepper was requested. People started asking if she could get them any weed, something she’d never touched to the best of my knowledge. I think the aviators had something to do with it. Her mutters of “suck it” became fewer and farther between in our card games.

One night I finally called foul. I marched up to her room. “So?”

“So?” repeated the homework clad Buddha on the bed studying by the light of a seashell lamp.

“What is going on?”

She Albina shrugged. “I’m changing.”

Walking away, I couldn’t be sure what was a greater indicator of the correctness of my suspicions: the fact that I really hadn’t phrases an explicit question but she had still known what I was asking about or the heartbeat flash of red I’d seen in her eyes as she looked up from the book.

She crashed into the tree the next day. To be fair, she could see the edges of the road, and the tree itself. Just not the tire in the center of the asphalt. I guess it was really bright out.

She flunked the eye exam that followed. Her brown eyes had been withering away, that last of pigments denied to her, leaving her utterly colorless and with corneas bared.

It was she that held Mother while mother cried.

“How can you just…?” she would start through the sobs.

“I’m albino. My name is Albina. I’ve been pretty lucky so far,” my sister said. “I figured it would catch up with me sooner or later. I’m at peace with it.”

“But… but surely… There’s something we can do.” It was more a question than a statement.

Albina just shook her head. Squeezed Mother’s hand.

“Your art,” I said. I was very nearly breaking down myself, sitting in Dad’s embrace.

“I’ll find new mediums.”

Dad just gulped. I could feel it through his arms. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“But. I mean… the way you are.”
    “I’ve always been this way,” Albina said. Never has someone been more grown up than her in that moment. Strange that some of us become mature before birth; I think Albina might actually have been born walking across the stage at her senior graduation, cane in hand. Like she had to have a reason to die before she could live. I asked her what it was like.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You must see something,” I said. “Is it all white? Or black? Or what?”

She paused. “I mostly just ignore it anymore. I find I can hear blue, smell if something’s sharp. It’s really the oddest thing, Brooke.” She stopped, chewing, as always, the intangible. “I think I’ve been missing this all my life.”

And so she went to college, fell in love with a boy she’d never seen nor would see. Adam was gorgeous by the way. She must have been able to hear that in him, smell the beating of his heart, taste the way his hands moved while writing. It seems that all of her senses had become one. Including love.

They bought a white Ford pickup and white town house in the city across the hills where they went to school. It seemed so natural, them trading off the world for each other. I assume they had neighbors who marveled at the blind albino woman who grew skinnier by the day and the budding gardener. When I took time off from my junior year in college to go visit them, Albina could always steer me right towards whatever plant she wanted, no cane needed. She looked at home in her wide-brimmed hat and yard work gloves. Like she had retired at twenty-three. Adam told me once he never stopped being surprised by my sister. That she could navigate so easily just by smelling and touching and hearing. But then I never assumed I could know what the blind did. Or the albino.

Much to my surprise (though once I married later, at least began to understand), Mom and Dad never did get a divorce or separate. I think part of Albina’s recovery from herself was seeing this, or the roots of it: that humans aren’t meant to mate for life, but choose to.

Once visited to find Albina in the grips of a terrible stomach flu, but smiling the whole time. And when they started sending out invitations to the baby shower they, asked if they could have it Mom and Dad’s house. Theirs was much too small, and their garden was just blooming.

The cross they gave her on the roadside wasn’t as white as she was though.

I still wonder, had she not been blind, if she might have spotted the drunk driver a moment before Adam did, grabbed the wheel, wrenched the car of its path to meet that bumper. But I can’t get caught up in that.

It was her name that killed her, laced with the designs of her illness. Dad had tried to wait for her to out grow it, Mother had tried to make her. But I wonder what was contained in those last drops of brown that were finally wrung from her eyes. How she couldn’t be complete until she was halved. At least in our eyes. Albina watched Afghanistan blow up in her face, and fell in love with the shards of glass flying.

I just hope that, at that last moment, she was still afraid to die. And knew it.

I dress that cross in white roses every summer, just when the sun begins to burn the fair.

The itch grew unbearable as he paced back and forth between the armchair and the window. He needed to check on it. He knew he should, for his sanity, to make sure they hadn’t found it yet.

He sat down in the armchair his hands on his knees, forcibly holding himself in the chair to keep from standing up and checking the window again. He’d seen the shows, he knew that they would be watching him, waiting for him to lead them to the evidence. All he had to do now was to sit and do nothing, to wait them out, then he would get the money. Then he would be free to do as he pleased.

It was an accident, at first. But as he had struck again and again, his determination had solidified. He would be free of the incessant nagging, the sullen looks, the sheer onus of it all. He would be free to do as he pleased, to meet whomever he pleased, to do whomever he pleased.

He told her he wasn’t able to have children, but he had gotten a vasectomy a year into their marriage. He had known even then that he didn’t want to be tied to her any more than he already was. There was being legally tied, and then there was genetically tied.

It had been a relief, a bloodletting like the ancients had once used to get rid of the vile humors. He had freed himself of the vile woman and none were the wiser.

But he had to check, he had to be sure.

He stood again and paced. The police would know. He knew that he shouldn’t. But what if they had found her?