Tissue Paper

Someone crouches to your height, already smiling before they reach you — tissue paper held out like a small white flag, soft, cheap, about to be too small for what it's being asked to hold. You take it because a hand you trust is the one offering. The smile means what it looks like it means.

I stayed a small blue stitch in that noise. No one told me to stand out — the shirt did that on its own, the way a bruise does, the way anything does that hasn't gotten the news yet.

The whole stand turned to a single throat, gold and green, opening at once into one long unbroken shout — I still do not know what to call it. A joy that size can sound like grief. A grief that size can sound like joy.

Someone reached over, smiling, and pressed tissue paper into my hand before I understood it was tissue paper, before I understood the smile wasn't mine to interpret. I could not tell if it meant here, I'm sorry or here, isn't this wonderful — if kindness and joy had gotten loose together in all that noise and now wore the same bright face.

I did not ask them to stop smiling. I did not know, yet, if I wanted them to.

Somewhere behind me a country was becoming its own shout,

four years folded down into a small, wet weight sitting exactly where a face is.

A stranger kept smiling at all of it like there was only one way to read a face, like grief were a smudge, like I would be recognizable again once it was gone.