The handmade paper plane landed on a parapet jutting out between the second and third storey. Not my first choice of location, but it would do. It would be part of her house for a while.

I knew you a little.

A red telephone on a white lace doily,

Big black glasses (real ones, those),

A mosaic floor, a torn nightdress,

A life lived for someone else.

You gave my brother a chocolate bar once,

A chocolate bar with dried fruit in it.

I was glad he didn't tell you that he didn't like dried fruit, And I ate it.

I knew you a little, Mala Di,

I wish I had known you more.

That song came on again on the ride back to the airport. I tried to sing along, but I couldn’t. Leggoyah ha, and there was a lump blocking the way.

Without my voice joining his, the singer’s words, in the way that words sometimes do, revealed the shape they were born in.

Let go your heart / Let go your head

Sophomore

September 2009

We used to go down to the Salvation Army store and buy plates to crash, and colouring books and crayons. In the fluorescent aisles of CVS, Nicole would look in her wallet, look at the tubes of toothpaste she couldn’t afford, sigh, and make the impractical decision to save our sanity, to try to be happy.

We would break the plates, drive our voices sore, then go back to her room and colour black-and-white drawings of cakes and lobsters.

I couldn’t leave her behind.

I went to our places, to buy our things, to try and do our things.

I threw the chipped blue plate at the dumpster. It crashed a loud, short sound. Too short.

I threw two plates; loud, longer. This was how it had to be done, then. So be it.

I smashed a plate at the gunmetal hulk of the dumpster, then another. I screamed. Smashed. Screamed. Kept screaming, kept smashing. The plates and my voice against that dumpster together, in a smashing, crashing harmony.

I screamed till I had emptied out my lungs, hollowed out one vital organ to try and heal another, and then I was done. Picked up my bag, turtled it on to my back, walked away.

There was a pinprick of light reflected on the touchpad of my laptop. I rubbed my eyes, not bothering to remove my glasses. I felt soft, malleable. There was no resistance from my face as my fingers moved across it, and my eyes hurt only momentarily from the pressure I applied to them.

It was 4.37 in the morning. Soon, I would go to sleep, within this hour and the next, and that would be the end of another day. I wasn’t doing this right. The days were moving by too fast. I was terrified.