I have this image of you and me tucked into the most precious corner of my mind. There we are, you with your seraphic face and dancing mind, me, round and brunette, more like my father with Japanese eyes and suffocating hesitation weaved into my DNA, a young five year old grasping your books in my hands.

That is how it began.

The same books I would read as years passed on. The books that watched from afar as everything changed. Books with dog eared pages, pencilled in words of "remember this" or scribbled lines and stars of inspiration, burnt pages from your cigarettes, warped font and wrinkled pages from your tears, my tears, my sisters tears. The tears that fell and fell until the three of us were drowning in that salty anthropomorphic ocean that started out a drop of pure rain. And on your lap, holding us to you, you told us how you built a boat to carry us toward some hopeful light house with twinkling lights and old wrinkled men in rain boots that would pull us to shore. When all along your heart was never our compass, we were drowning in your being. clinging to books in your library of the sea. tearing pages off in desperation.