I know that you're being spiteful when you ask me to describe the color yellow. It's hard being blind and Lord knows that I know it as well as you do, when I tied a scarf around my eyes for a day and kept bumping into walls and tripping over chairs—ones that you might have moved a few inches into my way just for the sake of finding out what would happen. My shins and knees and elbows and face still hurt from that.

And I hate to confess this to you, especially now when the sting of someone calling you a worthless cripple is still fresh in your mind and making you sour, but the scarf kept slipping and I couldn't help but catch an occasional glimpse of daylight as I took a turn swimming in your sea of eternal night.

Slivers of light after long darkness are the most beautiful things in the world. Don't let anyone tell you different. Don't let them. They don't know the truth.

I know that you're hurting and I want to help you, but all you want to do right now, it seems, is wallow in your darkness and your misery and make yourself bitter and cold. That's stupid. I dredge out the best of my prose and become more than clever, more than witty. I can manage witty fairly well. I will be artful now. I describe roses and sunlight and starshine and moondust, spinning planets and galaxies and the vast silence of space wherein the echoes of the songs of the seraphs bound and rebound into the distance and we see the face of GOD burning within the throbbing heart of every newborn star.

Astrology is a beautiful word. Your head doesn't turn and you don't look at me (you can't, though sometimes I pretend) but I know by your silence—so vast that it seems to magnify the chatter of the magpies squabbling in the yard—that you're listening.

I sit on your lap and discuss planes and angles and shapes, mapping trigonometric triangles on your palms and the backs of your hands, explaining diameters and radiuses and circumferences and the many infinite digits of blueberry Pi, counting them in swirling skirling patterns up and down your arms. I continue on about hexagons and pentagrams and algorithms and all of these other words that dance like sugarcandy on our tongues as we whisper them, because math and science have a music all their own that Monet and Shakespeare could never grasp.

I keep on talking and drag out Dad's old medical textbooks, flipping through the dry rustling pages until I come to the diagrams that hide nothing and show everything, delving inside like dwarves mining gold in the hearts of lonely mountains and naming and finding everything, every secret, every hidden thing. Femurs and tibulas and craniums and patellas and other magic words that gave names to nameless things to distinguish them from the masses of yellowed ivory and cartilage and those things that hold our marrow and keep us upright and walking. I will go waltzing with every skeleton in every closet and dance with the sugarplum fairies, bones clicking and fleshless face grinning at the magic of it all.

Get up. You need to get up now. Can't you hear the blackbirds singing in the hickory trees?

And I see that amused curl of your lip as I speak and I count it as a success, because even if there is nothing in your sockets but darkness I know that your mind has lightened somewhat as I take it and lift it and travel to faraway places on dancing laughing joyous feet. Let us fly and kick up moondust and become as close as twins sharing a womb, enclosed in night but knowing that dawn awaits in the third trimester. Let us find what constellations there are to be seen from the surface of Venus and learn the the dance-steps of Titania and the hidden meaning of Ophelia's submerged song. Let us take apart the impossible on the kitchen floor and slay dragons with swords made of glass and bathe in the attar of roses.

But more than anything else, let us walk hand in hand into your kingdom of darkness.

We can bring our own light.