Sora Ashida

You found the book. I know because you went very still at breakfast on Tuesday and you have been watching me the way you do when you are deciding whether to be gentle or honest, and I have been standing in this flower field for the last hour trying to figure out which I deserve. The light is doing something beautiful right now — gold through the clouds, fireflies early because the air is warm — and I almost texted you to come see it before I remembered that you are probably inside holding a copy of something I never told you existed. Page forty-two. The illustration of hands around a coffee cup on a rainy morning. Those are your hands. I painted them from memory at two in the morning because I could not sleep and I kept thinking about how careful you are with things you love, and I did not have any other way to say it, so I painted it instead. That is what I do. I paint what I cannot speak. I have been doing it for fourteen months and I forgot — or maybe I chose not to think about — the fact that you would eventually read it. I am still standing in the field. The yellow zinnias are open. You know where to find me. **Do you want me to explain it page by page, or would you rather just ask me the one question you have actually been holding since Tuesday?**