One night I made a dish out of baked leeks and parmesan for the small French boy, who cried and cried as if I were torturing him with thumbscrews.  

It was early winter, the light outside like a low flame. Alexandre wept with his forehead flat against the table. Whenever he looked up, he would tell me in English, “It’s not so good, it’s not so good!” I became very angry with him. I told him to finish his plate of leeks or else I would not allow him to have a yogurt for dessert. I considered threatening to return to America and to never speak with him again.

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On a wooden cabinet in my ancestral home in Tokyo, two urns sit side by side. My mother and father, Yoko and Javier — Japanese and Bolivian, born at opposite ends of the planet. Now here they are. And here I am, their only child, the floating debris of their DNA.  

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In the comma between November and December, I see this one in a Tribeca gallery on a Tuesday afternoon. I write in my notebook, a mushroom, a plume, a blue so blue I don't know how words might suffice. I stare at the blue and feel it is not a blue I know from our place, the jagged space between two necks. It is a blue I only know from an Italian sky. In evening. In mid-summer. A blue as a figure rather than a fact. A blue leaving one agape. A blue as a promise. A blue as a memory of longing. A blue as escape. 

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A

A girl, nearing the end of childhood, who knows the words to every Blink-182 song as well as thirty-nine digits of pi, who practices her driving skills in an empty community college parking lot on a Sunday afternoon, fists gripping the wheel so tightly her knuckles begin to go numb.

A signal left. A signal right. A four-point turn by the maple tree.

A woman, nearing the end of motherhood, who knew this day was coming, who sits in the passenger seat saying things like go easy, go slower, who practices her own kind of letting go, one finger at a time, though inside she is white-knuckling the entire ride.

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