all i can remember is that you spoke in starbursts. you were born under the shade of elm trees and for the longest time you were convinced you hatched from an egg. i never believed you, said you would never break something that fragile. you held sugar on the tip of your tongue and i watched it dissolve and made wishes on all the granules. you tasted like the kind of water you only see on brochures, all magic and no bite. i can still remember touching your canine teeth and the way they were duller than the butter knives in your kitchen drawer. we didn’t believe in psychics or palm readers so we wove our own stories into our lifelines and tried to find a way to tie them together. you can be in california and i can still be stuck in this no-name city but sometimes my fingers twitch and i know you’re reaching out for a broken drum stick or trying to make origami cranes again. i tie red ribbons around my wrist and if anybody asks why i try to explain that i can’t paint the whole town red for you but i can paint myself whatever color you’d like tonight. you put blue streaks in your hair and neither of us talk about how it clashes with everything you wear. we live through colors because we felt black-and-white before each other. we send photographs, we write letters, we pretend, we invent, we believe, we dream this impossible thing and keep it in between pillow talk. you paint one of your nails sea foam green, i paint one of mine crime-tape yellow, tell you i’m a walking murder investigation and your fingerprints are all over the evidence. you make me promise to keep it that way.