There’s not supposed to be fire.

Delicate blooms…

There’s fire but the flowers never blossom, never unfold, never come to anything, never flourish.

Sweetness is fragile, and the fire is immortal - or impenetrable - impassive-

Whatever it is you call things that kill.

I try to make my thoughts balance themselves, working out the kinks in my last lesson for the workshop.

Contrast and proportion. Light and dark. Soft and heavy. Why does the balance seem to swing further out of control the more you try to fix it?

I’m seeing too much red. 

And yet every hibiscus I try to paint these days turns into a fireflower. Every begonia and every rose.

I’m finding myself drawn irresistibly to shades of orange - hints of yellow - and every petal becomes a flame.

My flame…

I find myself sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with my head in both hands, rocking for no reason as I try to make myself focus or think.

But I can’t talk to him.

The more I try to solve the enigma - cure my empty spaces - conjure the missing piece to my broken ending the more the answers slip away from me.

I just need to wrap up a stupid lesson.

But I can’t talk to the people I’ve known for a decade without feeling like I’m doing everything wrong. How am I supposed to teach strangers?

I’m hopeless.

“Now at the end of our course together…”

No, that's not how it should go…

“As we reach the end…”

My mind begins playing “I Did It My Way” by Frank Sinatra and senseless rambles about the final curtain.

I’m panicking.

It’s not right! It’s not right!

It has to be perfect! It’s never perfect!

I bite my thumb and stare at my laptop on the paint-splattered carpet in front of me, all a mess of reds and yellows, like a whiny baby felt the need to overturn their dinner - throw it everywhere.

My mind melts a little more, and I think of Melissa and the way she talked about her husband and her son - wondering why it all feels so foreign.

There’s nothing. Nothing left. No answers. No time.

Why did I ever think I could do this?

Why did I ever think I could survive this time better than the last time? That I wouldn’t shatter and fall apart and lose my mind like the last time?

Think having a relationship with Kattar would go better than the last time-

-I tried to live and convince myself I was loved.

I can’t even…

Do half what it takes to keep myself above water half the time.

-Why did I ever think the word mother- mother-

What does it even mean to be a mom?

Do you always have to mess your kids up? Tear them to pieces and leave them in shambles barely able to make sense of whether that word means “giver of life” or “progenitress of death” - all of these horrible ways we can die on the inside or never come to life in the first place - but keep walking - “living” - “functioning”-

Kattar’s always had her at least. Always had everything he needed…BUT-

-Everything I thought I knew about anything falls to pieces in a mess of reds and grays and painted faces. Baby faces. Faces that will never exist and I’ll never see. Faces that only exist in dreams.

Even if I could have his…

I fight the headache crashing in and the shame, the burning flush.

I don’t need this. I just need to be able to function. Function. Move. Do something.

I’m falling to pieces. Why am I always falling to pieces right when I think I’m doing better? Why am I always falling to pieces with no provocation at all? Why am I always recovering and then blindsided by the reminder that nobody that’s lived the life I have has the right to be happy - could ever be happy-

What would it mean to have someone depending on me? To try to create a life that depended on me? To have a life living in my tainted and tortured being, that depended on me? 

I’d have to try. Not to die.

How do you make yourself want to not die when the only thing that’s ever unknown enough to look like an escape is…?

When my thoughts have never been in my control in the first place - just control me - and right now the puppet strings are all in a muddled tangle of worthless thread - doing nothing-

I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I can’t talk. I can’t work. I can’t function. I can’t think.

It’s not right. Nothing is as it should be. Nothing is perfect. Nothing is even good.

Maybe it never was.

*

I wake up on the living room floor beside one of my scattered canvases. 

I don’t know when or why I started doodle-painting on it yesterday, but I open my eyes to see an oil pastel version of myself with messy hair painting a little princess with pristine curls and an elegant gown. My dirty fingerprints in smudgy shades of brown dot the sides of the canvas where I must have moved the painting for some reason. I shove the whole thing away from me and hear a jingle that breaks through my fog with confusion.

Ohhhh. The keys.

Mr. Hough…landlord…

My landlord gave me two weeks to examine the other apartments and see what I might want to do with them before I finalize any decisions, but right now making any decisions feels like the most impossible thing anyone could have asked of me.

I can barely even decide whether I want to try to pretend to want to feed myself in the morning.

I haven’t yet.

But I should go…definitely go look at the apartments first. Forcing myself to my feet I stagger sharply like I’m tipsy, before righting myself against the wall, no doubt leaving more dirty fingerprints.

I don’t even remember which key goes to which door. I don’t even remember to lock my door. Just walk barefoot out into the cold again and down the short sandpaper-ish concrete path to the door of Apartment B and shakily try a dozen keys on the stiff faux-bronze lock.

As the door swings open I catch sight of snowy walls that seem a thousand times higher than mine - white ceilings - white carpeted floors - and I’m knocked senseless by the beauty of this emptiness.

This feels like peace. 

…Running my fingers lightly along the clean, unbroken walls in the perfectly blank space.

And something inside me says that I need this.

I don’t know why.

I can’t exactly make sense of it. But as much as I can’t find answers for anything - this place seems to answer itself.

This place is just like mine but it isn’t. It’s untarnished. Unbroken by high heel marks on the walls that mirror mine. No vomit-colored coffee tables by stained couches, no piles of hastily doffed dirty shoes on the tile entryway.

I don’t know what to do with this place, but it doesn’t seem to need me to, just yet. It screams 'time,' not 'steady collapse.' It doesn’t fall away or fall apart as I lay my hands on it or try to fix it.

I’ve painted myself into a corner in a dozen different ways, and I know it. It would be funny if it wasn’t too painfully ironic.

I double-check the half dozen designs that I’ve drafted on my cell phone for the apartments, and not one of them is quite right.

But they’re also not fire.

They’re also not burning and blazing pandemonium.

And I need this.

It’s a little too much of a reminder but…

It’ll be done right this time Daddy.

I promise.

*

I wander back through the lightly sifting snow to my own apartment for the paperwork my landlord gave me to read over for the second time, and to close the door before my front entry is filled with melted snow, but as I pick up the documents my eyes blur at the legalese.

And that thought scares me. 

I try to force my eyes into focus but they're suddenly too tired and watery.

But it’s a calm misery. For now at least.

Daddy.

I think.

I’m sorry.

Heretofore the buyer…

I failed you. I failed Mami, somehow. Maybe I could have kept anything from getting that far if I’d bit that snake the first day. I knew deep down that something was wrong.

I know I shouldn’t be the one apologizing.

But it was always just me. 

Always me trying to make everybody feel better - trying to take as much of the blame as I possibly could, if it could make them forgive each other - trying to dull the blow and patch up the hurt from all the sharp stings.

From those rosy thorns.

Trying to find a dozen ways to play the villain so I could be somebody else’s hero and never ever save anyone at all.

I tried to teach him how to read.

I didn’t do well, but I tried. 

How was I supposed to teach him?

I was probably 8 or 9 and he was so patient with me.

“Licita, you’re going too fast. Slow down for Papi please, could you repeat?”

But I failed. 

And Tia Miguelina knew it.

Isn’t it amazing how a day can seem cloudier the more times you look back over it in retrospect?

We were all so happy - he was so happy the day he’d finally purchased the house. No mortgage, no debt, and he told us all we wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore. He was going to make sure his family always had a place to call home. Take good care of his “corazones.”

But every time I looked back at the picture the neighbor took of us all standing in front of the house, Mami’s smile, as Daddy stands with his arm around her waist, looks a little more painful.

I try to go back to the paper, but I feel like I’d rather do anything else.

I want to curl up in my blankets and be a baby. Throw a pity party. Cry my eyes out.

I’m 28…

It’s stupid to cry for my daddy like this.

I’ve managed to avoid thinking about him, managed to stay angry for his sake to make it all hurt less but it never really goes away-

They shouldn’t have been able to take me away from him.

I want to cry for him. And I don’t want to pretend to recover. 

He deserves better than me trying to be okay without him.

Suddenly I’m angry - furious - all in a flash, and I want to tear everything to shreds- trash the paper- 

I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. Or wrong with the world.

I’m absolutely insane.

I hate everyone, and I wish they were still here. 

Maybe then we could have worked something out.

Not with Tia Miguelina. She’s still here - because only the good die young. And the scared and stupidly gullible like Mom.

If I ever saw Tia Miguelina again, I’d throw something heavy at her face. 

I’d throw the keys to our daddy’s house that she wormed and weaseled into our mother’s name - our mother’s house - because she knew he couldn’t read the contracts-

And I’d call her a thief like I didn’t have the guts to say to her face when I found out that day Daddy-

I’d do something - change something -

I wouldn’t have let her “help” Mom into the end of our family and that big ball of flames we all went up in the day Daddy found out - and stormed out - drove off and kept driving -

It was my fault.

Tia Miguelina knew it, and that’s probably why she was always so furious with me.

I couldn’t teach Daddy to read, but I could read for him, and he had no reason to believe that I would lie to him.

But then, he’d never believed that Mom would…

Life is full of shocks- and we were all - 

Eddying in the water.

We weren’t going to make it.

My eyes zone out on the letters - make them into blurry gorp.

I need to finish reading and sign this, and get back to work.

I can’t keep letting my life derail me and for some reason, that means that feelings will forever go in a box in a dark closet.

It has nothing to do with time. It has nothing to do with freedom. It has nothing to do with money.

It seems you’re never rich enough to pay someone to clean out your head when the guilt is in the very threads and fibers of your bones.

It always bleeds out again.