I realized today that I loved you. Eyes soaked and stained, burning even. At moments like these I wipe my snot on my shirt. Eat popcorn and let the crumbs fall. Try to enjoy a chocolate bar while knowing I’ll find my sheets freckled with small dark brown shit-like stains tomorrow.

At times like this I fail at distraction. I open a window, stick my face out, warm and wet, and wonder, “Why is the sky so fucking beautiful?!!”

My mother doesn’t like when I wash the dishes,

“Making her floors a mess.”

I have not mastered the containment of water,

have not engineered strict tunnels and pools, or

learned to press it around gently, just right.

I take a bowl in hand,

move around suds and dirt,

hum and sway,

sing a song,

dance,

rinse,

rack,

dance.

There is no room for precision in my body.

I fall down stairs trying to float.

My family no longer asks who fell. Or if I’m okay.

They know I am clumsy

and free

and fine.

Rumor has it that all of their flesh turned to crystal, and they loved it. The sun bounced around in their bodies. They felt so alive that even though their pain was heightened, it was overcast by their pleasure. Then, they disappeared.

There was a woman on my block, Mama Benson, who made tea biscuits every day, through her arthritis. She gave them to her friends, her neighbors, waddling from door to door with a strict bend in her back, her head turned downward toward the pavement, toward her hands, stuck in a posture she'd practiced daily in her decades of making and selling. She wouldn't let anyone help with her delivery. She wanted to give each gift herself. And she wanted to talk you up if you were home. I never cared for her tea biscuits, nor her rambling conversation, but my Mom loved them. And we all, at the very least, admired Mama B.

I heard from Sharon, who was both Mama B's neice and adopted daughter, that she glistened and stretched out, reached as if her body was breaking free, then was gone. Sharon was strange as she talked about her aunt's death. She'd looked into my eyes intensely as if she wanted me to understand something, like she was speaking in code. Then she'd looked past me, then back into my eyes again. A week after relaying her aunt's last moments, she too was gone.

Many of those who witnessed the last moments of the disappeared would be the next to go. There were reports that some intentionally exposed themselves, scraping up the residue of their loved ones, their friends, even strangers, with their bare hands. I heard one could buy the residue of a disappeared Jane or John Doe - no doubt homeless people who'd been preyed upon - on the black market. What was once a disease was now a drug. Sharon's death, then, did not seem odd.

When Sharon left plates of tea biscuits at all our doors, with a neighborly suicide note that read, "I didn't want to leave you without one last taste of our family recipe... and a bit of Mama B. :-)" Well, that didn't seem odd to me either. This may be hard to believe, but anyone who knew the Bensons, knew that family was the type to give until they died.

When my Mom brought our plate of biscuits inside, it sat on our table for a day as she stared at it, guarded it, picked up a biscuit, placed it back down, picked it up again. (I thought I saw her lick one.) Now, that did seem slightly odd. Also seemed slightly odd when, later, she sat firmly at the table, eating a tea biscuit slowly, breaking off each piece and placing it in her mouth like a delicacy, scooping up the crumbs. Slightly odd when she finished off four biscuits - no tea or coffee, then laid down on the couch.

Grief. I thought.

She sure did love Mama B. I thought.

She's taking this pretty hard. I thought.

The next day she began to sweat. Refused to do anything. Just laid on the couch changing color by the moment,  pushing away every cup of water, or tea, every bread or biscuit, all the while avoiding my eyes. Odd. I'd never seen someone get sick off of day-old tea biscuits. And I knew my mother didn't love Mama B that much.

The understanding of what was happening krept into my body before it settled in my mind. The sun went down and I couldn't get myself up to turn on the living room light. I sat in the arm chair looking out the window as the room grew pitch dark. I'd seen no one on the street that day, saw no one leave their house, or even open a door.

I looked back to my Mom, adjusting my eyes in the black room. I caught her gaze for the first time all day. Two deep pools of pity peered at me for mere seconds. She closed her eyes and turned her head away, toward the ceiling. Now I was sure of what my mother had done. What Sharon had done.

I knew no one would come to help. I knew that no one could help. I feared that seeking help would confirm what I'd suspected - that no one I knew was out there anyway. And I was afraid of what watching would do to me. So, I got up, laid on my bed in my room, and waited. I waited until the sun rose. I waited until it kept rising into noonday.

Finally, when the sun was high in the sky, I had the courage to peak from my bedroom into a bright and empty house. There were no sounds beyond the chirping of morning birds merging with the drone of our tired air conditioner.

That day, I did not think. I did not hesitate. I walked sraight through the living room, past the couch my mother had chosen as her deathbed and into the kitchen. I grabbed the half empty plate and tossed the whole thing - the dish and the stale biscuits - into the trash. I walked out the door, past Mama B's house, and I kept walking down the hot and empty street.

This was a feeling I loved: running on the summer air, my eyes on my target. I felt alive again, substantive, sensory. The afro-puff of a warm-skinned woman bobbed up and down in front of me, leaning to one side, then the other as the wind blew. I lurched forward with the breeze, reaching. My fingers fizzled into lean flesh when I felt a sharp tug at my scalp and heard the thin crack of a tree branch. I jerked back in shock. Spirits weren’t supposed to snag on things.

Below me, a twig and a fluff of hair lay on the ground — collateral damage. I wouldn’t be growing that back, but that was of no concern to me. I could be anyone I wanted. Look however I wanted. And since I’d died, I’d become used to living in the present, taking what I wanted, with no fear of the future. My only concern as I stared at the black kinky hairball resting at the edge of rubber-mixed asphalt and freshly coiffed grass, was this: that my life after life was coming to an end.

I scanned the scene for witnesses, panicked, and the layered sounds of the park submerged themselves into muted tones. The bushy-haired jogger in front of me paused, scratched at the shoulder I’d touched, stretched it, and took off again. A tired-eyed mother rested on a park bench, watching warily as a brother and sister jostled with plastic swords in front of her. As they played, the pastel-colored ribbons around the two large plaits of the little girl danced in the wind, catching my eye.

Just a week ago, I’d awoken to similar shades of pink, green, and blue surrounding me and a warm hum running through my borrowed body. This was how the Great Spirit — headmaster, friend, lover, judge, oracle to all spirits and bodies — often came to me, in colorful tones that reminded me of my own girlhood playing Skip-it in the Louisiana sun, painting neon-colored Lisa Frank nail polish on my fingers only to peel it off before I went to play with beetles and build dirt houses with ants.

But this time was different than past visitations. The Great Spirit was not here to comfort but to challenge.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” It said.

The colors that surrounded me brightened in intensity until they became fused into a near-blinding light. The warmth in the body I was in turned into a low burn. It was as if I was an ant under a magnifying glass, slowly singed by a large Southern sun in the hands of a ruthless kid.

“Show me then!” I shot back, annoyed. “Show me why I’m wrong.”

There was a silence impregnating the moment with suspense. I waited, indignant.

“Do you trust me?” It asked.

The garish light hovered just above me as I feigned deep thought. Then, it did something I’d never seen before — it flickered, as if wincing at my ambivalence. Then it softened into a blue-gray haze.

“This body is not yours,” It said. “Neither were the last five bodies you’ve inhabited. I beg you to accept what you’ve had and rest. But if you want another life and another body, that is what you will get.”

In the days following, I woke up many times on the floor accompanied by no lights, no warmth, only nausea-inducing pain. Still, I held on. This body was a perfect match: a well-paying job I could bullshit, a physique that could party.

A week and a half of torment passed after the Great Spirit’s visitation until, finally, as I vomited up two carne arepas and a coke my host vomited up me — right out of her body.

~~~

I moved swiftly, defiantly, until I could see the afro-puff of the jogger come into view again. I thought of cotton candy. The summer break before my junior year of college, my sister and I had walked Minute Maid Park as we crystallized bubblegum flavored tufts of air and sugar in our mouths, ignoring the game. Just two days later, my legs were rendered useless — then my hands, then my arms, my kidneys, my lungs, my heart — all gone within hours. My family’s desperate actions and desperate prayers had quickly faded into a smog of helplessness. But I decided in the depth of my being: This would not be the end for me.

I was close to the jogger now. As I attempted to press my hands into her shoulder again, she jerked forward, then turned around. Shit. I saw my shadowy reflection solidifying in her widening eyes and desperately lurched forward, pressing myself into her even more as we both fell to the ground in pain. My senses were on fire. There was an intensity of heat, a bubbling, a clanking wet struggle of flesh and bone. The park faded into an array of millions of colors. The colors blended together into darkness.

In pitch black, I found myself flowing down a tunnel as if being carried downstream in the current of a river. There was the famed white light at the tunnel’s end. I shuddered as I felt a presence to my right that I couldn’t identify. I turned to look, and first noticed a round puff of hair bobbing up and down in the flow of the tunnel. Below it, the two eyes in which I’d seen my reflection peered at me, then narrowed. Further down, well-defined cheeks began to glisten with tears as she stared at me, seething, incredulous. The light was approaching fast. I felt a warm burning feeling surround me again and with it, a growing trepidation. I knew I’d now have to answer for two lives instead of one.