Draft Age Family—we rarely say what we know. Every family speaks a little Cuban, some a lot. Kate had dared to ask and half-invited me to tell her if I sold weed, but then she also brought us closer again two days later. She left me another card on the breakfast table. The front was Van Gogh’s Wheat Field under Threatening Skies with Crows. Inside she’d written: “What is beauty but the beginning of terror?”—RilkeI think we’re beautiful. Within days we found ourselves in one of those unplanned, ridiculously hypothetical yet somehow inevitable discussions couples have, debating the merits of Rilke as the name for a child. I know, I know—I should have noticed the writing on the (vaginal) wall. Wheat Field was the last painting Van Gogh did before he shot himself. She was my gravity. If you do anything beyond breathe in physics class you learn that gravity isn’t necessarily a force that pulls things down. Gravity pulls mass together.
