Day 12

Beauty crowds me until I die.

          There are moments I can’t even open my eyes for fear the strength of it will consume my bones and burn my soul. My guitar hugs my lap and my fingers spin the strings. I can’t see the people gathering around me, but I can feel the way their hearts turn into butterflies between the chords.

          I play until my finger bleed, and I keep playing. I play until after the children have been tucked into their beds, and long after the lovers have escaped into their own. I play until I am the only one left in the park because I need the music to keep the world at bay.

          When my entire body aches beyond relief, Caspar comes. He never makes a sound and I never see him coming, but he feels different than the day people and I know it’s finally okay to stop.

          But tonight I’m wary. He’s been away longer than usual and I still haven’t answered his question.

          ‘Why do you always come at night?’ I ask.

          ‘“I see thee better in the dark; I do not need a light.”’

          I smile, and wonder how many others he quotes poetry to at night. I imagine him in a room filled with nothing but stacks of books. Dickinson, Yeats, Elliot, Whitman, Keats. Hours and hours spent absorbing every page so he will have just the right line from just the right poem should the need arise.

          ‘Did you bring my present?’

          ‘I admit, you had me stumped,’ he says, producing a cup the size of a small bowl from his peacoat. ‘But then I had an epiphany.’

          The last time we met, I told him to bring me the sunset in a cup and I would give him my answer.

          He places the cup on the pavement at my feet, and wriggles a well-used plastic water bottle from his pocket. ‘No judgement,’ he warns, filling the cup, but I’m too curious for mockery. He cups his hand and dips it into the water, resting it against the hollow of the cup. And then he stares. And stares. Like nothing in the world exists besides that cup.

          The water trembles and glitters with a light that doesn’t exist, and then a warm yellow blossoms in his palm, darkening with reds and oranges until the cup is filled with shimmering rays lighting the night between us.

          It is so beautiful I cannot breathe, but it doesn’t kill me. I can look right through it and not be singed. I reach to touch it but he pulls the light back in and the sunset disappears inside his palm.

          ‘It’s hotter than it looks,’ he says, drying his hand on his jeans. He looks at me, waiting. He will not ask his question again.

          This is my only chance to answer.