I remember the soft creases around her eyes, shifting gently as her voice danced over the opaline craters of Chang'e's moon. She read with Ma's frankincense and Daddy's foul cigarettes choking the air until I would press my nose into her sweater and breathe mellow freedom and sweet lavender.

I used to point to the liver spots on her hands and ask where they came from. Lindy just cackled. “They’re beauty spots,” she would say. I looked at my own hands, small and pale and nail-bitten. “One day you’ll bloom and taste the stars,” she continued, clasping my hands in her own. “Every night the moon will bend to kiss you goodnight and the planets will turn to curtsy. You’ll be a woman. Then you’ll have beauty spots, too.”

One night old Lindy paused mid-speech and closed her eyes. Her hands stopped moving. Her voice stopped waltzing in its high-pitched ballroom. I sat staring, waiting for more, but the song had ended. The air soured and sharpened to a still.

I screamed.

Old Lindy, beautiful Lindy, forgive me. Forgive my unmoving hands. Forgive my voice, reduced to a choked sputtering. Forgive my callow eyes which stared at death like an inexorable friend rather than striking it up and out of your trembling vessels.

Blue, Lindy, blue as cobalt. White, Lindy, white as chalk. Over time, are people reduced to the lame colors of death? Blue veins and white skin and purple lips – that’s it? That’s what I remember the most.

November sixteenth – I saw you lying there in a dress I had never seen before, eyes closed in pensive sleep. I wanted to touch but Ma said no. I wanted to touch, Lindy, I wanted to know what you were thinking about, what you could have been thinking about with so many teary-eyed strangers gesturing and sniffling and staring. I wanted to know what you were going to say next, how the song would end, how you would close the blank.

After that I didn’t stay.

I threw my hands to the sky and lightning broke them. I gave my lungs to the scabrous asphalt and they sublimated in a feathery mist of perfumed glass. I drove my body into the earth with the force of a hundred horses and it exploded in a smattering of red wine. I felt the moon bend to kiss me goodnight. The planets curtsied, then resumed their elliptical orbits. Thunder rumbled in a moment of regard and rain stepped gingerly around the mess I made.

I believe this is how people leave us, Lindy. No cry, no wind, no roof. Just convulsing in a pool of their own tempests, waiting, hoping it isn’t true.

Now I imagine I’m sitting with my back against your shoulder. If your shoulder was made of slate and granite, that is. The sky is hailing tiny pebbles of ash that crush and crumble in midair. The ground, a mouth of worn enamel, accepts them quietly with nothing but a dampened plunk. I think you must be somewhere beautiful now. Perhaps you are dancing in the Jade Emperor’s palace with Chang’e. Or maybe her archer is teaching you to pierce the core of the sun. Aim for the apex, dear Lindy. Curl your shaft around the highest spire of flames, touch the flag, dance among the dragons.