0. All Come From Dust

words by Mackenzie Pacquing, art by Alyssa Manolo

X. The notebook you give me is filled with smudged ink, black kisses transferred between the pages. I ask about words I will never need to use and you give me meanings with the same enthusiasm as the word before.

Candle?

Kandila.

Dog?

Aso.

Your handwriting is beautiful, picture-perfect cursive above scribbles from my small hands. I ask how to say cat, and when you say pusa, I repeat it back and inch closer to The Philippines. We talk about your cat Snowball and how soft her fur is. She passes before I meet her. When the sun replaces the moon, I am once again caught in time. The Wheel spins and spins and as feathers fall beneath an angel-ridden sky, I test my luck in catching them. They trace my hands and fall through the cracks. 

“Death is not so bad in tarot. It’s simple in practice—you are alive and then you are not—but in the cards, you can begin again.”

XIII. Like a lighthouse to a lost ship, you burn bright in this stormy room. Your head is wrapped in rosy cloth and the window is lined with orchids. Your sister, my mom, lines your eyes with purple and I watch as the pencil drags against loose skin. When you blow out ang mga kandila on your cake and greet another year with magenta smiles, the room rejoices. We were not sure if we would be able to celebrate this.

Pink has always been your favorite color—I see it and think of you. It’s in the hydrangeas outside my house, in my mom’s lipstick, in breast cancer ribbons. I have forgotten the words you taught me but I have latched onto what I have left. Dolls you have given me, handwritten notes with your telltale pink pens. Pearl earrings and wooden elephants. They were for good luck, you always said. 

Death is not so bad in tarot. It’s simple in practice—you are alive and then you are not—but in the cards, you can begin again. The Reaper is poised with a scythe, skeletal hands harvesting anew. I try to merge these ideas in my head and cast them in a less dim light.

“I do not want to rebuild—I want to resurrect.”

XVI. The Tower falls. I open my eyes for the third time that night, raw and red, and the sky is still dark from an unborn sun. Around me is fire. My skin runs hot.

In rubble I see you holding me after I fell off my bike. I see memories long forgotten, rewoven from strings of fate. I cling to the fabric it creates. I do not want to rebuild—I want to resurrect. Return to what I once knew and how I believed everything should have been. 

In the settled dust, I see my mom. She is like me, but with rubble and ruin to sort through about five times the size of my life. Her whole life is flames. We hold charcoal-covered hands and watch the embers go out.

XVII. Everything around me was built from nothing.