1. For a brief moment, I am the sun dripping through the gaps in the mountains, the yellow of the balsamroot flowers. For a brief moment, I am golden. 

My shoulders burnt, peeling. My face constellated with freckles. Hair braided with blades of grass. Boots caked in mud. Everything is beautiful; my heart hurts from trying to contain it. 

I lie down in the meadow, eat the slices of sourdough bread and heirloom tomatoes and fresh grapes I bought in town. I look at the mountains and imagine an elk with long thin legs and great big antlers staring back at me. 

For a brief moment, the world slips away. All I know is the fur of the elk, the softness of the yellow flowers. 

2. Flowers, their stalks a vivid green, their blossoms a bright yellow. Vincent van Gogh paints them in the south of France in 1888 and 1889 as he awaits the arrival of painter Paul Gauguin.

This marks a period of passion, of optimism for van Gogh. Of happiness. He paints his sunflowers, he lives in his yellow house, he dreams of starting an artists’ colony led by his hero. 

He paints and dreams, paints and dreams.

3. “Did you have a bad dream again?” my mother asks. I peer up at her with wide eyes, clutch my pillow. 

My mother holds my hand, walks me back to my room. Her hand pulling the rabbit-printed sheets over my shoulder. The press of her lipsticked mouth on my forehead. She sings me a French lullaby about a boy named Pierrot who dreams of the moon. 

“I want to sleep with the lights on,” I beg my mother. “Please, please, please.”

“How about I read you a story instead?” she asks. 

After she leaves, I turn the lights back on. 

4. I turn the lights back even when I am older. 

5. When I am older, I will look back on days of my childhood. Summer days by the Mediterranean sea, where my family is from. 

Tucked away in a tangle of olive branches and hazy sunsets. My limbs expanding in size, my bare feet dancing to the songs playing on the stereo. The world as green and pink as the bougainvillea trees behind my grandparents’ old villa, as yellow as the mangos my grandfather buys from the local marketplace. 

My mother still braids my hair into two plaits, tucks flowers behind my ear. Still tells me stories. 

6. These are my mother’s stories when I am young: a large-eared mouse who loves a princess. A black cat who live with a sea captain and learns how to ice skate. A woman who scatters lupine seeds along highways and country lanes, across fields and meadows. Who lives in a cottage by the sea. 

These are my mother’s words, drenched in sunlight. 

7. The world is drenched in sunlight as dawn breaks open like the yolk of an egg. 

Here is a diner, in the middle of the Midwest, in a town of white picket fences and manicured lawns.

Here is a diner with a flower box beneath its sign. Inside: rooster paintings on the walls next to photographs of customers. An array of wooden tables where people sit. 

An elderly couple laughs while sipping bergamot tea with honey, a pair of bleached blonde mothers discuss their children’s school. A man with basset hound eyebrows and perhaps a basset hound at home eats oatmeal with cranberries. Middle-aged waitresses call everyone sugar and darling, pour grainy coffee into chipped ceramic mugs, serve powdered eggs and pancakes swimming in butter. 

Leonard Cohen’s voice sings on the stereo, rich like dark chocolate. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. 

8. Does the light always get in? 

When I was younger, I thought it did. 

When I was older, I wished so desperately for it to. 

I wanted light to pour over the sidewalks, illuminating the alleyways. I wanted light to cascade around my shoulders, to settle like a blanket over me. I willed it to enter my body, to light up my eyes. 

9. In the eyes of van Gogh, everything is tinted yellow. The field of yellowing wheat surrounded by brambles and green bushes. The cypress trees, standing out against distant hills. The meadows spangled with dandelions. The sky whose tones are as warm as the crust of a loaf of bread, as van Gogh describes in a letter.

Historians speculate his yellow vision, or possible xanthopsia, is due to an overdose of digitalis or an overindulgence in absinthe. 

Others say it could simply be that he loved the color of light. 

10. Light filters in through the kitchen window, spins my mother’s hair into a halo. She wears an apron high on her hips, rustles through the pantry. We are making spanakopita for a dinner party she is hosting. 

The spanakopita is a pie made of phyllo crust, filled with soft spinach and feta cheese. It reminds her of her home, of the Mediterranean sea and her mother’s cooking. 

I brush olive oil on the bottom and sides of a baking dish as my mother chops parsley leaves, minces cloves of garlic. 

“When I first moved here,” she says to me, “I ate cans of tuna and soup for dinner every night to save money.”

“Every night?” I ask.

She nods. “All I wanted was spanakopita for dinner,” she says, “so now I make it whenever I can.”

She retrieves a mixing bowl, begins to crack four perfectly round eggs.

“Back in those days, I wanted dessert the most,” she says. “And not those cheap pints of ice cream at the supermarket, either. No, I wanted baklava, I wanted revani.”

She closes her eyes for half of a second. Lost in the buttery dough and sour cherries of baklava, the semolina sponge cake and orange blossom syrup of revani.

I close my eyes, too. Picture her and my father, moving across a sea and an ocean, moving so very far from home.

11. At home, I am cruel to myself when I am fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. 

I watch hours of lipsticked women on television whisk flour and salt, cream butter and sugar, fold in egg whites as gently as you’d tuck a child into bed. All the while, I eat only stalks of celery, halves of grapefruit, single slices of turkey breast. My mouth salivates. 

At night, I step in front of a mirror, naked. I count my ribs, trace a finger over their jutting protrusion. Admire the concavity of my stomach. Condemn the flesh of my thighs. 

I am cruel to my body. I do not feel beauty here. 

12. Here is a photograph of my grandparents’ wedding. My grandmother’s hair, long and soft, arranged in a decadent updo, adorned with pearls. In her arms rests a bouquet of peonies, roses, Queen Anne’s lace. Next to her stands my grandfather, wearing a striped tie and a black suit. There is still hair on his head, although he is prematurely balding. 

The photograph has yellowed around the edges with age, but my grandmother’s smile is still white and shining. 

She did not know then. 

She did not know that in forty years’ time, she would break her hip twice, gain pounds of weight, be forced to take medication that makes her face swell. 

She did not know that in forty years, she would have to feed her husband, bathe him, monitor his bladder movements, remind him of his surroundings. Care for him as a mother. 

In the photograph, she is only twenty-six years old. She is young still. 

13. Still a great deal of light falls on everything, van Gogh writes in a letter.

14. When did light stop falling everywhere? How old was I when I first began to see my body as a thing to shrink? 

I do not have the energy to get up. I sleep in, go downstairs to the kitchen, bring back an orange for both breakfast and lunch. As I unpeel it, I imagine unraveling myself as I would a citrus, round and round and round, down to the spongy pith. 

Later, after my parents come home from work, after we eat dinner together and my mother tells me to eat more and I tell her I will and then don’t, I go back up to my room. 

I watch the sky peel itself into a flesh of an orange, then paint itself golden. The clouds rimmed with violets. 

At that moment, I want nothing more than to devour the sky whole, see if it tastes like oranges. I want to pick off the violets’ petals. 

15. The petals and stems of van Gogh’s sunflowers lose their vibrancy over time, withering to an olive-brown hue. The change is not visible to the eye; it is X-ray machines that detect the decay. 

When van Gogh painted his sunflowers, he used chrome yellow paint. Chrome yellow paint is the most sensitive to light. 

I wonder if all yellow dims in the end. 

16. In the end, collapse was inevitable. 

One morning in June, I wake up, get out of bed. I have not eaten enough food in a long time, so I am used to feeling dizzy when I stand up.

But this time, it happens more rapidly. Specks of black consume my vision. I blink rapidly. It doesn’t help. I begin to walk toward the stairs, but the world turns dark and the sound fades from my ears. 

In the kitchen, my mother hears the loud thumping of my body falling like a ragdoll down the staircase. 

When I come to, I am cradled in my mother’s arms on the stairs. Her tears dampen my hair. My mouth tastes like iodine.

When I look in the mirror later, I see that my bottom lip has split into two flaps of skin, crusted with blood, bruised with yellow. I feel like I cannot breathe.

I want to be better, I tell my mother.  

I am going to be better, I promise her. 

In the reflection of the mirror, her eyes meet mine. She walks over, draws me to her. 

17. What draws me to him is the bright yellow of his raincoat.

I meet him within the first few weeks of college. We go to the local bar in town together, dance amongst the crush of bodies. After, we walk home along a path of willow trees, their branches budding green. In the distance, the glimmers with the luster of stars.

His hand brushes mine. Because I am drunk from vodka cranberries, because I feel the heat of his palm and smell the cedarwood of his cologne, warmth radiates in my chest and bubbles into laughter. I let go of his hand, dart ahead. 

“Catch me!” I say to him.

I hide behind the trunk of a willow tree, the grooves of its bark scratching at my back. I peek my head around.

“You’re not very good at this,” I tell him.

He smiles at me, steps forward. “Well, I think I just found you,” he says.

When I look into the blue of his eyes, he leans down to kiss me. When my skin prickles in goosebumps from the cold, he puts his yellow raincoat around my shoulders. 

18. My shoulders rustle with the tulle of flaxen fairy wings, my bare feet running across sun-drenched grass. I am six, and the park brims with chubby-cheeked children and floppy-tongued dogs and bright-eyed young mothers. 

My grandfather sits at a picnic table nearby, his herringbone fisherman’s cap on, his half-moon glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. As he watches me, he peels orange rinds, pares off apple skins, halves strawberries. Every time I whirl past him, he offers me a slice of fruit. 

“Here, little monkey,” he says. 

Sugar pools on my tongue, juice dribbles down my chin. I pretend my wings lift me off the ground, letting me eddy around the ebbs and flows of the wind and cascade into the cotton tendrils of the clouds. 

After an hour, my grandfather stands, stretches. Takes off his cap to scratch his weathered bald head. 

“Time to go home,” he announces. 

“No!” I say, sticking out my lower lip.

“Come on, little monkey,” he says. 

“But—”

My grandfather laughs. “We have to be home in time to make dinner before your mama comes home,” he says. “Don’t you remember?”

19. “Don’t you remember? I’m turning nineteen,” I tell him. 

My grandfather’s brow furrows. “Oh? That old already?” he asks. 

I pat his hand, warm and speckled with liver spots. “Yes,” I say for the seventh time. 

Sconces shine down from above as sweat beads my forehead. I stare at the restaurant’s marble floor, trace the patterns of its tiles with my eyes.

“You are so beautiful, little monkey,” my grandfather says as the waitress emerges from the kitchens. A cluster of matches clutched in one hand, a cake covered in yellow buttercream roses balanced on a silver platter in the other. 

My family sings to me, and I close my eyes to make a wish. 

“Why are we singing?” my grandfather interrupts. “What’s going on?”

“It’s your granddaughter’s birthday,” my mother says. 

“My granddaughter’s birthday? No, of course not,” he says. “She’s still little.”

“I’m turning nineteen,” I say. I scrunch the fabric of my velvet dress in my fist. 

My grandfather frowns. “Nineteen? That old already?”

I don’t answer, stare at my cake. Swirl a finger through its buttercream. My finger comes out covered in yellow. 

20. Yellow is the color associated with the deity in many religions. I like to imagine that a world exists where people do not miss sunrise and sunset. They are warm with light. This is their religion, their god. 

21. Yellow is capable of charming God, Van Gogh once said. I imagine him walking below the endless azure of the sky he painted. Down the cobblestoned Rue de la Martine, past the café with coral awning, into that pale yellow house with green shutters. He takes off his coat, hangs it up. In the kitchen: a pitcher of water, a half-eaten carton of raspberries. An easel propped against a rickety chair. A rough-hewn table with a vase of sunflowers. 

Cans of yellow paint, everywhere.

22. Everywhere I look, a tangle of beating hearts. Mustached boys eat pesto on focaccia, sandaled young girls lick scoops of ice cream. Women with pearl necklaces drink sweet passito wine, calloused fishermen seduce salmon into their nets. 

My mother buys me a hair clip from a street vendor, a delicate thing with a cornflower blue center ringed by buttery petals. As she brushes my hair back to nestle the clip into my curls, I catch hints of her perfume, jasmine and vanilla and amber patchouli. 

“When you wear this hair clip in college next year, you can remember me,” my mother says with a smile. 

Later, we follow a craggy trail up, up, up the cliffside facing the pastel buildings that line the coast. When we reach the top, we gaze at the wild sea, at the sparkling sunbeams reflected in the water. The light turns my mother’s eyes hazel eyes into a soft green. 

I turn to say something to her, but she is staring at the Mediterranean sea in the horizon. I wonder what she thinks about — trees plump with pomegranates, fields of poppies? Days of her youth, wearing dresses of silk? Her father’s eyes before they were bleary, baggy? Her mother’s hips, smooth, unbroken? 

Suddenly, she gestures toward the pastel buildings, asks me which one I like the most.

“That yellow one,” I say. It reminds me of sunshine. 

She rests her head on my shoulder. 

“What about you, Mama?” I ask. “Which one do you like the most?”

“Hmm,” she says, tilting her head. “I think I like that pink one next to yours. That way, we can be neighbors. That way, I’ll always have you close.”

I laugh. “We can cook spaghetti for dinner every night,” I reply. “You can play piano and I can read all day.”

She says, “That sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?”

23. Dreams that my mother never shoved her sadness into a tin box and locked it away tightly. That my grandparents never aged. That I never annihilated my body, that there wasn’t a scar on my lip, that there weren’t stretch marks on my breasts from losing weight.

Dreams of a warm kitchen, dreams of a girl in a gingham dress and chestnut curls.

I yearn to be that dancing girl, golden in the light.

I would live my whole life in that warm kitchen if I could. 

24. If I could put all this in a letter to my mother, I would seal it with yellow wildflowers. The letter would take a week to arrive. When she opens it, the paper would rustle like a sigh. And she would see, finally, the secrets I brush over. 

Sometimes, I’d write, the temptation comes on so strongly. The temptation to let the hunger grow. To let my body hollow out. 

Sometimes, I’d write, I stare at the mirror and wish that my ribs still poked out.

But the world is still beautiful, I’d tell her. I will never let myself shrink so much that I cannot find the world beautiful. I will let light in through the cracks. 

I would ask her, What is the most beautiful thing you saw today?

I would ask her, Is the sun out where you are? 

25. Before the sun is out, van Gogh watches the sky from his window. At the time, he is staying at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. It is several months after he has severed a part of his own ear. 

I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big, he writes as he paints The Starry Night. 

What van Gogh thinks is a morning star is actually Venus. It glistens in his painting, to the right of the flame-like cypress tree whose branches swirl in the wind. Glowing amongst the radiating orbs of yellow, above the village of small cottages and the church whose steeple rises like a beacon. 

Yet when he finishes The Starry Night, he regards it as a failure. Once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big.

26. I am still learning that the space I take up is not too big.

I am still learning that happiness is sometimes a dark thing disguised as a bird with yellow feathers. That is not easy for some birds to fly back home.

27. “Am I home?” my grandfather asks. We sit on the porch together, beside the yellow tulips my father planted for my mother. “Where am I?”

“You’re staying with us for a while,” I say to him. 

“Am I?” he says. “Are we in the Mediterranean?” 

“No,” I say. “You took a plane, remember? And now you’re in America.”

“No, that can’t be,” he says. Then he tilts his head. “I took a plane?”

I smile at him. “Yes, yes,” I say. 

“I took a plane,” he announces, satisfied. 

A moment passes.

“Where am I?” my grandfather asks. “Where is my wife?” 

“She’s inside napping,” I say. “You’re home with us.”

My grandfather nods. I reach out and take his hand.

“You’re home,” I remind him. 

He looks down. I look at the wrinkles of his neck. 

“Why can’t I remember anything?” he says. “Why?”

28. Why do we tell stories? 

Most of us do, in one way or another. We use them, time and time again. Listen, we say to one another. Listen.

We pick our stories; we spread them to prove things about ourselves, about the secrets we hold inside. We are curators. We are collectors.

These are the stories my mother tells me: There is lightness inside her all the time. She does not cry herself to sleep. She sleeps well. She does not feel hopeless at times. She will be with me forever, day after day. 

29. One day, I will take my mother back to the sea. Back through the winding dusty roads, the citrus orchards, the bushes of oleander, the barefoot children eating bruised pears. 

I will pluck a sprig of lavender from the earth, tuck it behind her ear. I will take her hand, place it on my pulse, tell her, See? Our hearts speak the same language. See? You don’t have to be scared.

And the two of us will walk down to the shore together, wind blowing through our hair. We will swim into the arms of the cresting waves, become creatures of salt and pearl, all soft skin and glittering eyes. 

I will be the one telling her a story this time.

30. The story goes, Vincent van Gogh eats a can of yellow paint because he wishes so badly to be happy. I imagine internal organs the color of daffodils. A consumption of light, a heart painted yellow.

31. “Yellow,” says the boy with the yellow raincoat, the boy I love. He tells me I would be yellow if I were a color. 

“Why?” I ask. 

“It’s soft,” he says. “It’s like sunshine. It’s the warmest color.”