It’s hard to dream of a cloudless place. Behind my closed eyelids, I struggle to conjure up a soft blue sky with not a wisp of a cloud. But it’s impossible to imagine that there isn’t one solitary bugger that just rains on one lone person out there. Somewhere, in a city unexplored, a man or woman or child, unbeknownst to me, looks up, and they can imagine a sky spotless as they ignore the clouds above them. It amazes me how people can do that—take the reality they exist in, and make their own existence their reality. The monotone dry brushing of the sponge against the already clean pan only adds to the depressing, yet banal truth that I can’t be like everybody else.

I unscrew my eyes slowly, like opening a precious vial, filled with the jewels of my imagination. I look up and I see what I’ve seen for 16 years, 364 days, 23 hours. The damn ceiling. I scoff. Eggshell white, not a bump on the surface to show for all the arguments and chairs flying through the room and all the birthday balloons that were torn away from a little kid’s hands in a fit of rage, the iridescent black hair cut in rough, jagged edges strewn all over my childhood and the kitchen floor.

I shake off the pensive mood and, in my most mercurial of moments, turn and smile a smile that doesn’t reach my eyes at the male sitting at the cracked table. I call him The Man, because I don’t know how else to define one. He is the most and least a man could ever be—his tongue amputated from a treacherous cancer, but his eyes and ears linked so when he counts to ten he feels morbid and hears honey dripping sorrowfully from the laden eyes of a bumblebee and sees yellow. He has some strange affliction, I don’t know what the name is, but I know his wires in his brain are tangled around. I know this from his writing, which he hangs on a clothesline when he does the laundry on rainy Sundays. He wants the words to wash away and trickle down into the earth, so that eventually they will go up into the clouds and rain down on him again, filling his mouth and eyes and ears with the words he has sown. The Man cherishes his words, while I can’t stand my own. If I could have somebody else’s words in my brain, come out of my mouth, and out into the air, I wouldn’t chase away those I loved, love, and will love.

I wish I could say that I’ve not always been so pensive or moody or disparaging. Truth is, ever since I was in elementary school, I drew my suns with frowny faces, and no shades. I ruined the whole pattern. Despondent is the word the Teacher would have used to describe me. The Teacher sneaked me lemon squares and handed me tattered books when I couldn’t read as well as other kids. She offered me her young hand to hold while others struck theirs against my cheek. She whispered to me that I was beautiful while the mirror screamed the ugly back at me. The thing about the Teacher was that she never took off her vermillion red lipstick nor was there ever a flyaway from her golden, coiffed hair.

Then one summer day when I was thirteen, the Teacher waved goodbye to me from her red Chevy, not bothering to lower the windows. I couldn’t even see her face, just the shadow of her hand, because the tint of the windows thought it unfair for me to ever have a proper goodbye. The ice cream cone she had bought me ten minutes ago melted lazily down the chewy cone, plopping on the ground and fizzing in the July heat. And I didn’t need another sign that the Teacher was never coming back.

That was the day I felt true sadness.

The Man appeared that day. Only then...he wasn’t a Man. He was nothing but a Boy.

Many people say age is a determinant for wisdom, that the older your eyes grow, the more they see, they more they recoil from humanity’s vices and follies. I believe it is your tears that measure your wisdom. It is only fit that the Boy was crying, rivulets of tears seeping into his ochre skin, his pores absorbing all the wisdom of the sorrows of the lives of others. The Boy swallowed his past with every lick of his gooey, ostentatious walnut and butter ice cream as he stood behind me, crying quietly as I cried, for we both missed a part of ourselves. I missed my guiding the Teacher; he was missing his health.

We sobbed until our heaving matched and I whirled around angrily, dust flying into his face. He had no right to have as much wisdom as I did. To see as much of the world as I had. The Boy was not welcome. And yet I loved him. The Man is not welcome. And yet I love him.