Most of the apartment eludes description, as if it had long ago slipped into the backgrounds of awareness. A dusty cracked wood panel floor dully lit in a path across the living room from end to end. The edges of an imitation Persian rug that is more tassels than tapestry, parallel to the royal blue couch, nearly present in its entirety save that the far reaches of its backing lay in a shade of obscurity against the near imperceptible face of a coating of garish green wallpaper. A wide and clear bay window perpendicular to the couch, such that it looks upon the nearest royal blue arm. And a skeletal stair rail of plain cast-iron black from which he descends to the far end of the dusty paneled path.
He comes forward towards the window. He sits himself across from it along the curling felt of the armrest, and leans to one side until his face lies half in shadow, pressed up against the vague garish green. The light streaming in is languid and like the brevity of winter days, abortive and curtailed, almost unnaturally so. He thinks how odd it is that life should be no more than a collection of brilliant memories shining up from among the vagaries of time and the fallibilities of human consciousness, and how despite himself things without any rightful place in the present slip through the chinks in reality to overwhelm him, and each one is ineffably unique, like an indescribable taste or experiencing the word ‘happy’ instead of merely saying it. He remembers trying to tie his shoestrings into two floppy bunny ears…

It’s the first day of preschool. He’s sitting on the little step facing the van’s double doors, where the carpeting has been worn bald by years of passing feet: stepping up and in, down and out. At the moment, tying his shoes is giving him trouble. He doesn’t know exactly when he learned to tie his shoes, but a wave of pride washes over him every time he does it right. Two floppy bunny ears, pinch them at the head, twist them in a knot and pull your shoestrings tight. There are two ways, he knows, his mommy told him. One with two bunny ears, the second with a bunny ear and a loop. He has only mastered the first way, the second having eluded him. He reattempts the two bunny ears. The two little ears fall apart as soon as he pulls his hands away. He works his awkward fingers with the utmost earnestness, only to fail again. The two bunny ears method isn’t working today. If only he had been able to learn the one ear and a loop method! A deep disappointment in himself surges up and threatens to drown him anew in tears.
His mother opens the door from outside. Light pours into the van, limpid and pure. She ties his shoes quickly. He watches intently his mother’s hands. There is always a magic about them that calms him. She lifts him up as if he were yet an infant, though he’s gotten quite heavy, and sets him on the ground. She tells him to be a big boy, then kisses him on the forehead and hugs him close to her.
They had him fingerpaint something. He dipped his fingers in all the colors, in no particular order, and made a rainbow. Every day from that first until the last, fingerpaintings were what he enjoyed the most. And almost every day he made a rainbow, until they asked him if he wouldn’t like to paint something else, after which he only made rainbows on days when he felt scared or sad. But that was much later on.
Then they had him wash his hands, and when he asked them what he should do next, they told him to go play. He stood for a moment in the fingerpainting area, staring down the long stretch of dirt and sand along which lay a jungle gym, a climbing tree, a sandbox, a toy box full of trains and cars and trucks, and from everywhere at once a steady invariant clamor: children squealing, yelling, laughing, and fighting—in other words, playing.
He forces himself to set off down the strand of play things and possible playmates. The first station is the sandbox, its sole occupant a tall ruddy boy of pale complexion. Encouraged by the fact that like him the boy is alone and might also need someone to play with, he lingers uncertainly to one side for a few moments wanting to put himself forward but not knowing how. The boy digs in the center furiously with a plastic shovel, piling sand up against the walls of the box, clearly aiming to dig a hole as far as it will go. Sand slides back down in rivulets all around him, refilling the hole as fast as he empties it.
Can I play with you?
The boy pauses and looks up.
No!
Sand goes flying. He blinks. There is sand under his eyelids and he can’t see. He bursts out crying, and though it probably helps wash away some of the sand, at the time, for some reason, all he can think is that the crying will only make it worse and he will never be able to get the sand out of his eyes because he couldn’t stop crying.
To calm him down, they take him inside to a little classroom full of colors and construction paper cut-outs. They ask him who did this to him, and although he is afraid and doesn’t want to say that anyone did it, eventually they get him to point someone out, even though he can’t be sure it’s the right boy.
He tried to recall to mind the words his mother had used to tell him when she’d be back, to promise him she’d come back. Surely she had promised, and she always kept her promises. But he couldn’t remember; maybe she hadn’t said anything.
Outside the concord of children’s voices sang innocently and sweetly. But he was a cautious child, and stayed inside the classroom, sitting at a low round table with two or three other children and one of the ladies who encouraged them to play with the glue, crayons, construction paper and dull scissors.
He watched despondently, not daring to think that his mother had left him here, alone, with no rescue in sight.
The teachers watched him with compassionate concern, as his little body occasionally trembled with stifled sobs and hiccupped sniffles.
And the hours were long.

There is a girl sitting beside him on a short brick wall beside the parking lot. He steals glances at her while they chat, her blue-grey eyes in the sunlight so near, and he braces his hands against the warm rough bricktop to ward against his shaky nerves. There was, in those days, nothing more beautiful and inexplicable than her.
It had begun when he kept seeing her different places: in the halls during passing period, a football game, the lunch-time meeting for a student group. It turned out they had a lot of friends in common, but he didn’t dare ask them about her.
She smelled faintly of flowers, something that always bewildered him. Once they had sat talking on the wall for ten minutes after school, and when her mother pulled up in the parking lot, she pushed herself off the wall, whirling around absentmindedly to wish him good-bye, and that mysterious scent washed over him in the wake of her whisking hair. He guessed at that moment the source of flowers had to be a shampoo or conditioner that she took a particular liking to.
He writes poetry for her.
She is, to him, a girl like the Spring, and he the melting Winter chasing after her, always one step behind, shedding layer after layer of snow and ice, until eventually he leaves it all behind when she and he came face to face, and he has no idea who he is, or where he is, as if he has ceased to exist, erased by bliss.
He laments the impossibility of his love for her, the way he imagines lovers should, tearing at their hair, striking themselves on the chest or legs out of frustration and desire and awe. He frets for hours in his room torturing himself, alternating between the pangs of unworthiness and the distant glimmers of hope which upon close examination are no more than hooks to hang himself from.
Love, her torrential nature, her unnatural ideals, wreak havoc on him, and in some way that is what he wants, what he wishes upon himself.
But eventually he can’t stand it anymore, so he resolves to do the practical thing and ask her to the high school homecoming dance.
It takes him days to work up to it. Every time he tries to ask her the question, the words get stuck in his throat, and only after he is released from the oppressive euphoria of her presence does he retire somewhere and sigh out the wistful fancies of his silences. When he does manage to ask her, they are sitting on the low-cut brick wall where they have become accustomed to keep each other company after school the past few weeks. Her mother is particularly late today, and she asks him if he is always picked up so late as well. He replies as naturally as possible that his mother works so he always has half an hour wait before she comes. They talk of little things, he asks her again about her homeland, where she was born shortly before a devastating war broke out and her parents fled. She replies with a dreamy look in her eyes, the shine of things half-imagined half-real, as she tells him about it and her summer visits there.
Finally a tiny break in the conversation gives him his chance, the last of so many chances over the past days and weeks. He takes it and blurts out the question without pause or preface. She looks at him with surprise, then assessment.
The Homecoming Dance?
Of course, she smiles, that’d be nice, she just has to ask her parents. And he is overcome with warmth and happiness and sunlight and the colors of her eyes. Realizing he is staring, he looks away and blushes, unsure what to say. Luckily he is saved by the honk of a horn.
Bye! She waves to him.
Thanks! Thanks a lot, he shouts without thinking, then wonders if he has made a fool of himself. He waits for the dark shape of the four door sedan to disappear around the corner, then hoists his backpack onto his shoulders and starts his daily walk home alone.
Later she would tell him her parents had said she couldn’t go, and apologize deeply in that gentle way of hers. He would choke down tears, grin weakly and say it was ok. He had known it would end this way, in any case it had been too good to be true. But that was later.
For now he walks home dreaming of a rosy future, his feet dancing in the sky on cotton candy cloud paths and his head so high up as to see the daytime stars that twinkle their auspicious signs back at him from beyond the limits of the atmosphere.
And as he draws ever closer to his home, he slows his pace more and more, lost in impossible thoughts, his face blank save for the quiet ghost of a dreamer’s smile, walking a path of iridescent sunlight and flowers, willing it to never end.

There is a city sitting on two hills, he remembers, a city ancient and new, a winding city in the valley, on the slopes, the streetlamps under mist at night, at dusk, rising up like stars on either side, surrounded by the watchful red tower lights of army outposts. A sad beautiful place.
He has come here to do four months of volunteer work, to see it with his own eyes, and to prove to himself that he is human, that he can cry and bleed at the altar of suffering like one ought to. The morning before he arrived two people were killed, explosives detonated in the early morning somewhere downtown, flushing them out to be shot, or maybe they were killed by the bomb, maybe chunks of ceiling fell on them, crushed their skulls, or maybe it was all a myth conjured of blasting powder, dust and debris. No one knew, and this left an impression on him.
He is immersed in the flood of disparate voices. The swaggering fighter boys, who lounged about on the sidewalk, in a car, slightly unhinged, full of bravado, who at night bear arms to shoot at and be shot at by army incursions, and who are failing high school, the joking shopkeeper who is too serious to say anything serious, the proud university student who is too smart to become a fighter but swears he will fight with his life, mind and profession, and there is the old man whose name means sword and who briefly takes him in like a grandson, stopping him every day to tell him, in installments, how each of the old man’s living family members betrayed him, left the country, or had a falling out with him, why he in his old age, the oldest of five sons, is alone. Everyone telling him a different story, every story converging on one point: bravely, foolishly, stupidly, humbly, angrily, to live, die, love and suffer are one but not the same.
And the children, from everywhere, in every street corner children who curse him for being a foreigner, children who are quietly impressed that he has come to work here, children who speak to him in riddles, children whose bluster becomes abashed astonishment when they learn he can speak to them, children in raucous abandon pouring out from the nearby elementary school, children who cast angry stones at him, and children meekly serving tea and staring curiously but quietly when he comes calling at their houses, by invitation of parent or older brother.
He meets Hamza, who is five, when he accepts an invitation from his mother and father to take tea with them. They are caretakers of a small Christian graveyard hidden behind a stone wall ten feet high at the foot of a staircase he takes daily to get to and from the volunteering office.
All he remembers is that after tea, Hamza’s older brother took him on a tour of the graveyard, which is a sunny lot overgrown with wild grasses. It’s no more than 30 yards across lengthwise; Hamza tags along and is dressed in a SuperMan costume, apparently for no other reason than make-believe. Hamza clambers atop the highest tombstone on the highest knoll and shouts,
“Should I fly? Should I fly?”
Yes, yes, they shout, fly.
And Hamza leaps off, arms outstretched before him, his cape trailing after him in a simple polyester arc shimmering among the sky and the graves. He lands in the grasses; his legs give out so he rolls into the fall. His older brother cracks the type of mild mannered smile reserved for younger children: loving, patronizing. He is about to resume the tour, when Hamza is again shouting,
“Should I fly? Should I fly?”
Hamza has already climbed back atop the tombstone and is looking down at them expectantly.
He laughs. Yes, yes! Fly, Hamza, fly, he says.
Hamza catapults himself into the air, cracking up hysterically as he goes rolling through the thoroughly flattened grasses, then leaps back up and races back to his perch atop the tombstone. His brother, tour now forgotten, is laughing too.
It’s peculiar how children remember. He saw Hamza in the neighborhood every now and then, play soccer, running with the other children—just a hello, a funny comment, a relentless grin, but not much more than that. Nevertheless, after an absence of several months he returned and Hamza remembered him like he had never left. And even when the months between visits became years, he liked to imagine that little five year old boy as a friend who remembered, just as he was remembered.
And what of the city herself—she is still there, waiting gracefully, presiding over a broken dinner table, her children lying hapless among the pleats of her skirt that fans out from the two hilltops, spanning the narrow valley below-—what has he taken away? Hope, Despair, Resolve, Inspiration? He doesn’t know; there’s nothing but the memory of it, tearing at his soul.

In his apartment, the day has gone cold and a chill creeps into his bones through the window—he can see the end. It is in an infinitum of remembering and forgetting. His body begins to go limp, and he slumps farther into the dimness of the garish green wall. The sunset bleeds colors from the sky on the razorblade horizon—yellows from amethyst to lemon, oranges from amber to copper, royal blues, kohl blacks, colors between fuchsia and magenta, and above them all a pulsing red, wild, violent, and vibrant—and slowly, one by one, they begin to ebb out of him, and pass into the darkness of the night. And only then does he let out a long “ahh…”, as if in pain, or regret, or realization.
He shuts his eyes and draws in everything he can in a single instant, desperately trying to resurrect the echoes of memory, revisiting so many familiar temples of selfhood, clinging to what is left to him before it’s too late. In a flash he re-experiences it all, imbibing not the hard and fast details, but the substance, the sublime, and as he opens his eyes one last time to record in memory the most intimate details of that dying sky, he mutters, “it’s beautiful…”.
What happens next is up to conjecture: an empty eternal night reigns in the sky, or a patch of deepest purple yet remains poised on the horizon, reflecting in his unseeing eyes. But all of that is one immeasurably small unit in time later, prior to which he is already gone, a ghost in the mind’s eye of another world.