D10 :: Uzi Kerouac

I found it. Something lost like me — dirty, forgotten, abandoned as trash in a ditch. I was walking from nowhere to nowhere and Bear said not to touch it. Don't you pick that up, Uzi, he said. I was right not to listen because it was too beautiful to be trash and when I told Bear that he changed his mind and said it'd be alright if I kept it, because he understood. He had found me in a ditch once. I was someone's trash that day. He understood.

I didn't know what a wig was until he explained and then we took turns putting it on each others heads and making faces. It matched his beard: brown and scraggly and sad looking, even when he smiles. Maybe that was why I liked it so much, even though I washed it in the river that night until it was as pale as staring straight into the sun. After that it looked more like me. We're both an unimportant kind of small and too bluntly cut, but loved by someone anyway, because... I don't know. I don't know how Bear knew he could love me when I was just a newborn, screaming thing. I was so ugly. He tells me I wasn't, but I know I was.

It's been a long time since I've been toothless. I remember it somehow, laying there in my own filth and learning what hatred was for the first time in my life. Then there was Bear, sixteen and mine, and I wrapped my nubby fingers around him and never let go. Not until today. But I didn't let go. I didn't. The Peacekeepers pried us out of each others arms even though I was screaming and ugly again, telling them they couldn't have him. They asked what Bear was to me? I said, my brotherfatherwalkingtalkinghugginghomeofmyheart and they said no. Like liars, they said Bear wasn't my anything, but that isn't true at all. I belong to him and he belongs to me because I'm his and he's mine and the only home I've ever had is the space between his arms.

Roofs are good at keeping rain out, but they also keep out all the sunshine, starlight, wind, and world. Bear and I never needed one. Sleeping on the riverbank or in the park, we had everything figured out and houses were always just this strange otherness of walls and denial. They say I'm going to live in one now. I say they're about to learn what a little girl and a bullet spitting machine have in common. Just because I'm skinny doesn't mean I'm easy to bend and breaking isn't even an option. Home can't be changed like that; it is what it is and mine is someone's heart. I don't know what's hard to understand about that, but a man in a white uniform said that's not how it works, said I was homeless, said I didn't know any better. I stopped listening. He was a stupid man.

Bear is really smart. A genius, maybe. He taught me how to read and write and do math. We used to do multiplication problems together, written out on scrap pieces of cardboard with pens he stole from the bank counter or the checkout at the grocery store. I have a whole backpack full of them. Just pens. Every one of them has a logo or an advertisement on it, trying to look important. Sometimes I tell them its okay, they don't have to try so hard, because I love them for what's inside, not out. When they run out of ink I bury them like dead pets. Bear digs the holes for me and I say something nice and he's never once made fun of me for it.

That's why I love him, even though more and more he looks at me and dissolves into confusion; he understands the way I feel about hollow things and I understand that sometimes he is a hollow thing. Before I was ever a person, he loved someone else that wasn't me. I don't think he even remembers what she looked like, but when he tells me I'm growing up to look like her, I know what he means. It's not because of my real hair or my fake hair. How many eyelashes I have. Not my small fists or my big nose. In his heart, love stills looks like love and in that way we could be twins.

Other people call his confusions craziness and only see his bandaged knuckles. They look from him to me and him to me and him to me and their expressions are worse than anything Bear has ever done. At least he doesn't do those things on purpose. Those strangers don't stop to realize that I'm the one who wraps the bandages around his broken skin, one hand at a time or that I'd never have been anything except trash in a ditch without him. He cries after we fight and I forgive him because he's sorry and there are times I have to curse and claw the crazy out of myself too. When someone holds onto you at your worst, you have to hold onto them too. No matter what.

They lied so they could put him behind bars and tell me I'm safe now. I won't be dirty or hurt or deprived anymore, not once they lock me away in a house full of strangers who have never cared about me before. I don't know why they'd start now. It's not as if I care about them either. I'm not an orphan; I know who my family is. Bear says I have the sky in my eyes and that he sees me every time he looks up, but I don't think there's a sky where he is. We're both being put in boxes where lost things are kept and I don't know how to find him. I won't be safe until I do. I understand that much.