He's standing in that doorway again. It’s like he heard “Dweller on the Threshold” once and climbed inside it like he was a hermit and it was his shell. It makes him look so small, like maybe he really did lose his shell and this was the only one he could find. Like he must have been scrambling for safety and once he found some semblance of it he never wanted to move again. So instead he wedges himself in these doorways. 

 

It’s like watching a game of limbo, seeing him caught so soundly between worlds. It gets unbearable once the stick gets this low. Only the ones who really care keep going, and who cares that much about limbo?

 

But what an obtuse way to metaphorize your fear of the future, right? I just wish he’d jump in already, even if he has to go feet first. Like pencil-dive style? Like a bullet fired right into the deep end? Like you really want to touch the bottom of the pool but you can’t swim there on your own so you try to gravity your way to it? But then you run out of breath right before you can touch it, and you freeze for a second trying to decide if you can still make it. But you can’t. So you flounder your way back to the top and you’re gasping for breath and you tell your brother you touched the bottom anyways, because he always does. He always can. 

 

He’s always so colored with some deep blue despair, that hermit boy. Not really royal, maybe more lapis or cobalt. I want to paint him happy and careless and free. Like carolina, baby blue. Born-again to try again. But there’s no palette in this world that would let me, and no easel for him to lay bare on. He sits folded between the pages of a decade old coloring book; ferociously filled in but immediately forgotten. 

 

Childlike passion is so listless, so unchained, untethered - so incomplete and indecisive - so fleeting but so full. So earnest. He’ll have to stay there until he remembers. For now, I’ll fill his shell with clouds and sunbeams and little swirls and curls. I’ll fill it with him and me, I’ll fill it completely.