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[the first day]

the little boy, he had swallow-wrists and ears like a sailor's; they were attuned to the sea and could hear froth and moon and flight in the crooks of silence. (the doctors called this delusion.)

he liked to fold paper airplanes with the lightest wings, never tried to make them glide, but they seemed to hover in their paleness and detachment. i thought, he's perfected the art of escape— the flying not flying, the absurd disregard of gravity even as they sat there, row by row. no one else could see it, their absence, yet it was plain to my eyes and so i realized that i shared some insanity with the boy: a kind of not sight but rather willingness to see.

"my father taught me to fold the ships," he told me, as i hovered cautiously in the hospital doorway.

"you mean airplanes?"

"no, ships."

it took me a while to realize that he talked in oceans. his speech had to be translated in order to slot neatly in world of ordered cotton sheets and whitewashed walls, the words that spewed out were slurred by tide.

"i never asked father who taught him to make the ships. because someone had to, didn't they? or else how could he learn? he left the day i was planning to ask and he didn't come back yet. but mother says he will come back.'

i wondered how it would be like to have such an unraveled child, deterioration blooming like coral lilies at the seams of his skin. would i leave him? probably not, for there is something almost violently lovely about the rupture and yearning of children; the boy was damaged but beautiful.

"let's be friends," i said. he smiled haphazardly and i took this for affirmation.

and so it began.