Collage

A tiny piece of

Lidia—her

favorite hair tie—pinned

over the light switch

so not to be

forgotten.

This is how it

began.

For whatever reason,

the hair tie stayed there, joined soon after

by a picture of a swimming pool I cut from

a magazine—I’d always wanted a swimming

pool.

Next came a page

ripped from The Little Engine

That Could—a happy group of

fruit and candy.

That night,

the growing collection won

a smile from my mother.

“A collage,”

she noted.

A collage.

Pieces of my life tacked,

taped, and glued onto

the green wall across from

my bed.

After a few years, I began

a second assemblage in the center

of the wall, gluing

two sets of eyes cut from

third-grade school photos—

Lidia’s and mine.

“So creepy,” Lidia said. But

she laughed. And

I added our noses.

Gradually, I surrounded

the pieces of our faces with

other pieces of us.

Tickets to a

movie my grandparents took us to see,

Lidia’s mother’s business card

because I didn’t know what else

to do with it, a fast food

cup Lidia told me not to touch

when I plucked it from the curb

to throw in the trash. With the germs

already settling in on my hands, I carried it

home and

stapled it to the wall.

The collage surrounding the light fixture

spawned the collage surrounding our eyes

spawned another and another, until

my wall resembled

the effect of multiple rocks

thrown into a green pond, rippling outward.

Each original piece

the sun

in the solar system

of my bedroom wall,

or, as Lidia liked to call it:

“A vertical mess.”

She wasn’t wrong. Collage wasn’t beautiful.

Not in the way a single photograph or

a painting might be. It was clunky, uneven,

and random.

When we jumped to middle school, the

collage jumped to a second wall—

Our seventh-grade algebra homework,

shredded and shellacked.

A ferocious act of release.

A testament to mathematical fortitude.

Art.

Then a spray of notes

passed between us through eighth.

Each scrap

torn apart

words scattered.

We didn’t need them whole

to know what we’d said.

Over time, the green paint of my walls

disappeared, and my bedroom became

a world made up of

other worlds made up of

other worlds, so that

my desk, the bed, the telescope, me—

we are all just pieces in the

collage.

Lidia Returns

I WAKE TO THE SOUND OF WIND GUSTS FLAPPING THE LOOSE siding of the old triple-decker. Naked tree branches swing in and out of the square view from my window. A flock of birds flies across a gray morning sky.

They remind me of something. Something I can’t remember. A warm feeling of hope flutters in my stomach.

Then I see why.

Lidia is here.

“Hi,” I croak, my voice still asleep.

She smiles that Lidia smile that shows up in her eyes even more than on her mouth. “Get your lazy ass out of bed,” she says. “You’re sleeping the whole goddamn day away.”

“I’ve missed you,” I tell her, my eyes watering.

“You’re such a fucking wimp.” She laughs. Hopping up, she neatly pushes in my desk chair with her one hand, and I remember the other. I remember it all.

“Lid,” I whisper. “Lid, I—I’m—”

“Oh, look.” She cuts me off, walking over to my window. “It’s starting to snow.”

Snow?

Minnesota.

I turn to my telescope and silently mouth the words:

Thank you.

Lidia takes one look around my room and gets to work. She stacks my books into a neat pile. She refolds the extra blankets that had slid off the end of my bed. She picks up the dozens of pieces of shredded tissue littering the floor surrounding my bedside, placing them inside one of the three half-empty glasses of water sitting stagnant on my bedside table, all the while complaining about my destructive habit. She’s overly familiar with my love of ripping things into tiny pieces so I can build something new out of them later. Just as I’m overly familiar with her extreme love of tidiness. She doesn’t miss a single shred.

Lidia, who has cleaned my room a thousand times. Lidia, who I haven’t seen for so long. I can’t take my eyes from her, or stop smiling, or keep the tears from running down my cheeks and into my pillowcase.

Her job complete, she heads to the kitchen, expertly balancing a pile of dirty dishes and trash. Even though she was born with a single hand, not much ever got in Lidia’s way.

Not the cardboard milk cartons from kindergarten that said Open here, and never did.

Not the rope that snaked its way thirty feet up to the rafters of the middle school gym.

Not the complex microscopic system of threading a sewing machine, the tedious building of a kinetic sculpture out of toothpicks, the impossible physics of a chin-up bar… not even team sports, where a sweaty symmetrical body seemed a requirement.

Lidia would ache, strain, sweat, boil, grunt, tear, smash, leap, quiver, burn, and bleed before failing to accomplish it all.

Lidia pops her head back into the room.

“Don’t fall asleep,” she says.

That’s your trick, not mine, I think through closed eyes, because she’s already gone.

Something I Don’t Know

“Lid,”

I whine.

“Lidia, you’re sleeping.”

It happened every time I slept over.

Lidia would fall asleep

and I’d be left

awake.

“I’m not,” she mumbled,

completely sleeping.

“Tell me something I don’t know,”

I urged.

“Play the game.”

We played this game

all the way through elementary

and into middle school.

Our own version of truth or dare.

Because I knew

everything about her

and she knew

everything about me, the

tiny things we divulged in the dark

were scraped from the sides

of our thoughts. We liked to say

they were the things

that grew our brains

together.

A stolen answer

on a vocab quiz.

An orange penis

discovered in her parents’ dresser drawer.

Songs whose lyrics

we ached to think

might one day

be about us.

The thing we wished we’d said

to some jerk,

instead of the thing

we did say.

The shocking discovery of the belt

that went with the penis.

Lying together in the

dark. The walls

as familiar as our skin,

and the warm air a soft cushion

on which to place the

somethings we didn’t know

so that everything was

known.

Everything.

“Come on, Lid,”

I complained.

“Play.”

Watching her sleep, all

beating heart and breath—free

from being capable, sensible, punctual

Lidia—she became even more beautiful

than she already was.

“Lid,” I tried

hopelessly.

“I love you, Eve,”

she whispered

through a final sleepy yawn.

I sighed.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Just Like It Always Was

THE