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When he catches me, and we roll on our backs toward the star-filled sky, I do not see the diamonds, the glittering shards that have shone there for billions of years, but the blue-black canopy between them. I see it and think of my watercolors, of carving Bristol from linoleum, of Polaris-with a twang, of Camie's hand in them all, of the thousand ways she'll never see her touch unfold-and somehow recognize it's this very darkness, the cutouts, the envelope of holes that makes the stars so sharp and beautiful. All that absence isn't negative space.
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