1.
To the boy who believes that if he does not look at the world,
the world cannot see him:

It is a lie.
When the world turns dark
when your eyes are shut,
you may feel it is perpetually this way.
But when they are forced open,
open like a blank canvas,
open like Locke’s tabula rasa,
you cannot avoid being marked.

It is like this:
you were born.
You did not choose to be born,
but you have been. And in a world
that thrives on color,
on paintings, and on markings,
no one can forget
that you were once here,
that you were once alive.

2.
How do you make the most of this life?
It is quite easy really.
Pick up a paintbrush.
Brush on yourself, on others,
the color of Red, of Blue, of Orange,
and paint a rainbow
and hope its beauty
will rival that of the stars.

3.
She often feels
that there is nothing
distinguishable about her;
that, if she were gone,
no one would remember.
She is wrong.
She often thinks
that no one would recognize her
from a List of Traits;
she is not pretty,
she is not ugly,
she is not thin,
she is not fat,
she is not smart,
she is not stupid,
she is not talented,
she is not un-talented.
She is. She merely lives,
and respires,
like any other animal
would, having been placed on Earth.
Look here.
Look now.
She is wrong, I tell you.
She is wrong.

4.
The reason he believes in the lie is quite simple.
It is brief, sure, but in that brief moment,
it is easy to think
that darkness is all-encompassing;
that, when you close your eyes,
the world’s eyes are closed, too;
that, if you do not see,
no one else can, either.
It is a survival mechanism,
you see, and without it he would not have survived.
It is like when the hunted deer,
shot in the rain forests for game,
closes his eyes
right before he goes.

5.
The reason she is wrong is quite simple, too.
The world has marked you.
When she respires,
the world hears a rhythm
Her lungs sing
a perfect scale—
majors and flats and sharps.
When she lives,
she writes,
she walks,
she consumes—
and the way she does these things
codes her, defines her.

Her handwriting
is weak;
once, it was strong.
Her pencil used to dive into the seas of the notebook pages,
but today, it swims quietly along the lines.
The way she creates her ‘A’s,’ is unique;
she writes her uppercase in the lowercase,
employing the cursive she learned in the third grade.
When she walks,
the world hears her bounce,
and though she tiptoes,
light like a feather,
there is a degree of confidence
in her every step.
Sometimes, when she reaches the vertex of dejection,
she runs fast
away from the limits that cannot reach infinity--
and when she runs,
her feet often slip,
leaving behind a droplet of dark, mahogany red.
And that blood,
the marker of her existence, does not disappear,
even when the grounds are sanitized and mopped.
That blood,
the marker of her being,
colors the world’s slate,
and in return,
the world colors her.