Picture Books

They asked me to tell them a story. Not just a simple tall tale I could make up in five minutes; they wanted a real one. The children found our book in the bottom of a cardboard box, the box so damp and green from humidity it almost erased my pencil-made scribblings from twenty years ago.

You remember the book with summer covers? The blank journal we started filling during the afternoons by the lake in the month of June? The covers were painted bronze with tiny green vines running up and down, like us in the forest under the dark golden sun. The only hint of you in that journal was your attempt to a perfect signature, right in the first page along with my clumsy letters piled up in an illegible name.
I told you hundreds of times that you should have written the story, with your always elegant handwriting; but you found some kind of joy watching me handle the pen with care, feeling every letter and comma coming alive in my attempt to make readable sentences.

So many summers later, I sat down on the floor, counting the threads of the soft watercolor carpet in the page as if it were the only thing that mattered in the world. I was in the page, wearing my pajamas and cuddled with a soft blanket, protecting me from the icy air depicted as some blue strokes near a window.
While turning the dusty pages I traveled across time to find you, wearing the cleanest orange t-shirt I've ever seen and the khaki trousers you always had on, no matter how old they were. You smiled while I scribbled down the ideas that spurred from your head, one by one, like crumbles thrown to hungry birds.

I always was the writer and the painter. You were the weaver of adventures, the sailor of dreams. I could print in the page what you sketched in the air with such precision it seemed as if we were one soul in two bodies, both made ouf of the same heart.
You would whisper me tenderly; narrate the small anecdotes from your imagined childhood you knew by heart and confess your feelings between giggles. I drew the stone castle, the knights and horses, the crickets near the pond, the dandelions dancing off the page with the wind I blew.

I was your voice when you couldn't speak. The tiny awereness of being creating something bigger than us everyday. Many times I brought you back from the desert and gave you the water you needed to keep going. You said I was your guide.
At night though, you were the lamplight that would protect me from the darkness, lulling me to sleep, giving me your dreams as an antidote against my irrational fear of never seeing the sun again.
No debts between us, you see.

When we finished writing it, you gave me the journal for safekeeping. I treasured it for long years, since it was the only piece of you I was left with after you moved. You became a picture in an old notebook, your accent only evoked by the wind during summer.

Later, we both became writers. I heard you found a cold and neutral voice and I lost mine within the colors of my broken palette. Still we decided to record our lives, just for the sake of not forgetting them in the future.

You wrote your life in the pages of an old history book that has been in your family for centuries, adding new characters to your lineage, always typing with impeccable grammar and correct use of language.

I wrote mine out of sketched drawings; scribbled my life's sentences as simple chronicles spread in tissues in case I ever had to cry over them, so my sadness could wipe them off the memory. I drew the big fancy lettering, so bold and black it distracted you- even if just for a moment- from the scene I was living: A photograph in black and white, faked smiles and no movement. My life was still before and after you.

I used to cut myself with the edge of glossy paper. Every change in life, every page turning, came with a little bloodshed. It kept me here, present. The borders of my soul were stained red while the rest of me was decaying in sepia.
I dared calling myself an artist, knowing my Muse had died with you.

My life, I resumed, could fit in less than thirty pages, colorful images spread across the pages, summer hints in every face and tree.

At the end, I only kept the good feelings. Everything else had been written in pencil and life took care of erasing it from the record.

The rhymes we sang together are still stitched in the paper, repeating themselves in my head every now and then. Eventually they have become the riddles of my own heart. With small fingers I dare touch the colors, grasp the threads of a carpet I dreamed of, sitting by your side...

Just when the children's eyes were closing, sinking deep down into their dreams, I told them I drew my life, kept it in some old pages, inked the letters that make my name and closed it forever.
That book sits in the shelf beside the faded memories I keep of you, written among forgotten colors in an abandoned journal.


...Suddenly I realized that after you left, I wrote a line I was too scared to pronounce back then. Now, it remains as the secret I never told you, constant like guilt.