Keeping my first toothache to myself for a week because I refused to admit that I had already begun to decay. At twelve.
Theo navigates around a slower cyclist, a young woman with backpack and black headscarf. He dings his little bell deferentially, glides past, computing what the day will hold for him.
How every month you have to help your father fill out government forms because he never learned how to read or write your face burning beside his at the kitchen table.
It could be said tat color in painting is like enthusiasm in life.
A dull caravan of meetings.
How you had to spell out to him what it meant when the parents of your best friend didn’t invite you to his birthday party.
If you practice—
The new article for his website, The Healthy Smoker. The phone call to smart, proud, quietly sexy Ayaan, nudging her to move forward with the next script.
How they shoved you into a black box at the back of their brains and actively forgot you there.
— you can see things more Japanese.
A leisurely afternoon holed up in the studio, editing, a-sea in shell-gray cigarette smoke.
Then you looked around and discovered all the others crowded into the same black box as you.
Lemon, flax, primrose.
The black spiked fence backed by unclothing trees hemming the park.
How your father couldn’t get his mind around what you were saying and then slowly he did and then the quick look in his eyes.
Blackbirds.
The somber gray miniature bunker of a pissoir to the left of the southeastern gates.
His eyes narrowed into recognition.
You can experience colors by their textures, smells, sounds.
The blue and white tram.
Their silent heat.
Dear Theo: If I fail here, what does my loss mean? — Your losing brother
Linnaeus: a poet who just happened to become a naturalist, August Strindberg remarking.
Your father’s taut stillness charging the room.
Straw, sand, saffron.
06/05: Theo’s in-progress Hitchcockian tribute to the limp-wristed baldy who was nine days away from becoming Prime Minister when—
You thought your father would hit you.
The mornings hovering in bed in my small room with the single skylight, refusing to rise because I wasn’t quite sure I was me.
Pim Fortuyn.
You braced yourself against his impending open hand.
Because I wasn’t sure I wasn’t.
On the other side of the fence, the dark pond punctuated with white birds.
You’re not the only one in the universe your father replied flat as the Dutch landscape.
Sometimes my lives fell on the same day.
Look: gulls lifting.
Quit complaining he said at last quit feeling sorry for yourself.
Staring at the ceiling, wondering if the memories that rushed me were in fact mine or a stranger’s from whom I caught them like a bad cold.
Herring gulls, black-backed, Mediterranean.
It’s easy your father said you get respect by earning respect and you earn respect by working like you mean it.
Still, Gauguin liked my sunflowers, once he had had a chance to study them a while.
Pim shot dead in the busy parking lot at the state-owned media park where he’d just given an interview, by one Volkert van der Graaf, a vegetarian and animal rights activist. At fifty-four.
Put your back into your life quit whining like a woman.
Gauguin painting me painting my sunflowers last November in Arles, the rumor of a summer backdrop at the bleak cusp of winter, telling me about his someday plans to sail to the tropics.
Gezellig: the bee buzz in its abdomen.
You began to snivel which made him ask Why did Allah give me this girl instead of a man what did I do to deserve it?
To live on fish and fruit, Gauguin explained, brush loving canvas.
The row of clunky black bicycles feeding at the trough of a bike stand.
Disgusted your father pushed past you out of the room wanting nothing to do with his son anymore.
Busy, Gauguin said. But interesting.
Six bullets pumped at close range into Pim’s head, neck, and chest — in the defense, van der Graaf later told the police, of threatened minks everywhere.
How do words explain how embarrassed you felt for your parents not because they missed what was going on but because they knew exactly?
Was I or wasn’t I that red-haired boy who modeled a clay elephant and then smashed it on the floor because his mother praised it more than he thought it strictly merited?
A vegetarian. An animal rights activist. Six shots to the head, neck, and chest.
The look in your mother’s eyes across the breakfast table as she tried to place what you’d become.
It is not easy to say.
Van der Graaf changing his story, declaring at his trial that he had actually killed Pim to protect Muslims who couldn’t protect themselves.
Because your parents knew exactly yet had to pretend the opposite because they were too proud to show just how humiliated they actually were?
There is the little red-haired boy whose parents sent him away to Mr. Provily’s boarding school in Zevenbergen twenty eternal kilometers north: the one standing in his suit on the establishment’s steps, waving goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, his mother and father’s carriage diminishing relentlessly.
Muslims, minks, and other vulnerable groups, listing van der Graaf.
Thinking about how your earliest recollections aren’t of an event but of a feeling—
Japonisme: the intense hues, the two-dimensional decorative patterns, the way the world motifs into design.
A vegetarian.
The need to watch out for your parents because others openly treated them like children.
The prints you happened across in Antwerp. How the moment you saw them your work jostled into something fuller.
Because you do what you have to do, if you want people to think about what you’ve thought.
How you and your friends were simply let loose on the streets as if in a Moroccan village because—
Twenty and twenty-five are bad enough, thirty sheer incubal lancination.