If by Nina G. Jones

referred to it like some artifact.
    He pulled out a small black flip phone, and if I didn’t know anything else about him, in his paint covered hair, jeans, and stubble, I would think he was a hipster with an ironic phone.
    We exchanged numbers.
    I walked him to the door. “I’d like to create with you again,” I said. “And I don’t think you’re nuts. I think you’re brilliant.”
    He pulled his hat over his eyes and tugged it back to get his hair out of his face. “Thank you,” he said. And just then is when I noticed he had trimmed his beard since I saw him earlier that day. He turned and walked away.

    ASH
    Walking down that hallway after whatever the hell that was with Bird, I felt alive, giddy. I didn’t let her see that, but it stirred things in me that I had worked hard to keep contained.
    Most people’s souls hide inside of their minds and bodies, but Bird is inside out. Her dancing, with the sweeping transparent ribbons of color that followed, was the embodiment of a divine gift. Her dancing was the closest I could get to heaven without dying.
    When she danced to “Oh Darling,” the colors around her intensified, her halo of lavender deepening to a royal purple. Clear angular shapes, like exotic crystals, birthed and died in a glorious explosion like fireworks in my field of vision. The heat she often caused traveled from my shoulders down to my fingers as it often did, but this time it also traveled down my torso and crept down into my groin and it was beyond heaven, it was ecstasy. At that moment, I understood the sensations Bernini sculpted and Caravaggio painted.
    There was a reason I kept to myself, isolated, away from those I cared about. Feeling good was dangerous. I needed to be flat, I needed to keep the colors, sensations and tastes as bland as possible. I hated the meds because they stole and dulled everything about who I was. But I had no choice: the meds were a necessary evil to keep my illness from rearing its head.
    When Bird was pushing me to paint, she thought I was scared of failing, but I had already failed. I was afraid of getting good again.
    She didn’t know it, but this past year, Bird gave me something to look forward to. While the rest of the world had dimmed, she shone as if nothing had changed for me. I could only imagine what she would look like if I stopped taking the drugs—and that was a dangerously tempting thought. Watching her, seeing her laugh, feeling it on my fingertips, reminded me of my old self. The good parts. That was the problem with my illness, it always started out feeling good, but almost never ended that way.
    The meds weren’t enough. They didn’t change what happened or what I could become. They dulled the inevitable, they delayed the inevitable, but they could not stop the inevitable.
    Bird was tempting a live wire and she didn’t know it. She stood there, her finger on the switch, without even knowing how close she had come every time we met. She was tempting me . . . she was triggering me . . . and I didn’t want to do this to her. I didn’t want anyone else to have the same fate as my sister, Sarah.
    Bringing Bird into my life didn’t fit the plan. It went against all the sacrifices I made. I left my art, my soul, behind.
    Maybe it wasn’t a switch, maybe it was a dimmer, and she was turning the knob ever so slowly, so that I couldn’t even tell that it was turning, and then the light would be blinding and it would be too late.

BIRD
    I WENT TO both performances of Jordan’s show, and both were gorgeous. In true Jordan fashion, it was not your average Christmas show. Somehow, given a small budget, he turned it into high art. The story of the Nativity I had seen what felt like hundreds of times had a become a revelation through movement. I wasn’t alone in this feeling. The show even got some good coverage in the LA Times. For a local theatre production, it gained some pretty good buzz. In addition to both showings, I also partook in the