My oldest memory is of my younger brother, R.C., eating a smashed overripe tomato. I remember the way he grabbed at the pulpy red flesh, and the way he could only hold it one way: as tightly as he possibly could. This is normal for small children who have not yet mastered their motor skills. There is no difference between holding and squeezing. They don’t know any better. He didn’t know any better, and neither did I. Of course, the guts of the fruit broke free into the spaces between his small fingers, and made a mess on the white tray top surrounding him. By the time he opened his hand to take a bite, there were only cold strings of bright skin and small white seeds.
My brother was too young to walk, but I wasn’t. It was I who rooted around in the bottom of the refrigerator, found the food, and attempted to slice it for him with a butter knife. He’d been crying in his walker, the little wheels scooting back and forth across the floor as he flung himself from side to side. My mother slept so hard his wails didn’t stir her. I didn’t want her to wake up. I wanted her to sleep, and I wanted to help. My brother and I were fourteen months apart in age, so I must have been around three years old. I don’t remember a time before him. I was supposed to have been a miracle baby for my mother. She’d had an ovary removed as a teenager, and her doctor told her the other one didn’t work. It worked enough for me apparently. Then R.C. came along, and I was not a miracle anymore. I was a big sister, and to me, that was better. I loved him too much right from the beginning.
I saw my mother go to feed him each time he cried, so I thought food would make him happy. He was my best friend. I would take care of him. I rubbed his head and whispered, “Don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry.”
When I was in college, one of my therapists at the on-campus counseling center told me I shouldn’t remember any of this because I was too young. He told me most people don’t have memories of themselves or their experiences at two and three years old. He asked me when I started speaking. I told him that I could speak in sentences before I could walk, a fact I’d been reminded of by my grandmother every chance she got.
“You couldn’t walk straight for nothing. We called you Stagger Lee!” She’d say, laughter ripping through her entire body, infecting anyone else in the room, even me, often at my own expense. “But you’d point at something you wanted and say, ‘I want that!’ I thought, what kind of child is this?” She’d shake her head, recreating the same confused look she’d apparently worn all those years ago.
I told him my grandmother had a tendency to oversell my childhood intellect, so I couldn’t be sure if it was accurate information. He wrote it down on his notepad, and I continued to tell him my stories, or what I remembered of them. My earliest memories are sunburnt Polaroids, frozen moments gone blurry at the edges and spotted all down the middle. Then, at four, the pictures become clearer and clearer, as do the voices within them. The loudest voice belongs to my brother, before he could properly pronounce my name, calling for me.
“Hashy? Where are you? Where is my Hashy?”
My brother loved me and made it so easy to believe I was good. I was a child, unspoiled in a certain way. I didn’t doubt myself. I decided and I tried. Then I’d fail and try again. Or I would succeed and go on to try something new. I was not always as afraid of the world or as nervous about the other people living in it alongside me, or what they might do to me. When my life was new, I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing, or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.
When I was four years old, I taught myself to lie awake until morning. I wanted the sunrise, and I only had to stay awake to have her. When children are small, our desires seem small, even if we want the sky. Anything we  want seems to be only a matter of time and effort away. It’s too early to imagine what’s already holding you back.
I’d been enraptured with a storybook about the cycle of the sun. I remember looking on in awe as my teacher outstretched her right arm, extending it as far as she could, her fingers spread for the illusion of an extra inch. Her left arm moved out and away from her body, though not as far as its opposite, still close enough to read from the book she held. It was a simple and sad attempt to describe the sheer enormity of a life-supporting star to a pre-K classroom.
She said the word “sunshine,” and we said it back. Her eyes roamed the cramped space for something to support her lesson, a point of reference that might get this thing to click. The taupe tile floor, and its matching tattered and stained square reading carpet, had nothing to add. Nor did the sky, nor rain falling from overfull clouds inching down the window behind her. Still, she tried to get us to understand, to sit down, to stop talking, to want to know more about what the universe might be up to while life so far had been teaching us to be wholly consumed with ourselves.
I wanted to know. I sat quietly, and waited for her to continue the story of the sun. My teacher turned the second to last page, revealing the final illustration. Those massive swirls of orange, gold, yellow, and a smattering of sweet pinks left little cracks all over my heart.
I gasped.
I repeated the word “sunrise,” and the sound opened like a spring bloom on the tip of my tongue. There are few words worthy of the wonders they describe, but sunrise sounds like it feels. A u sunken to the bottom of one’s throat, and an i, pointing upward and onward to a warm beyond.
I’m sure I’d seen a sunrise sometime before then, and had maybe even heard the word before. The sky was already one of my favorite things. It told me what kind of day I might have. A sunny day usually meant being outside with family, especially R.C., my brother, best friend, and favorite playmate. Sometimes our mama even played with us.
Rainy days were charming too. My mother, brother, and I would sit on the couch together, small limbs draped over big ones, and watch movies. We had four or five kids’ movies on VHS and my brother learned them all by heart. Every once in a while, he would get lost in a movie, sitting, staring, and speaking every line of dialogue as the actors spoke it on-screen. My mother, grown frustrated, would yell, “Shut up or I’ll turn it off!” He would stop. But after sitting a while, staring a while, and forgetting why he shouldn’t, he’d start to do it again.
When she got tired of kid movies, my mother would put on something meant for older audiences. My brother and I would watch those too. My obsession with sunrises and sunsets was only stoked by their repeated appearances in the introductions or theme songs of some of my favorite television shows like The Golden Girls or China Beach. I’d never noticed the sky above our home look anything like the orange and gold dreamsicle clouds in my teacher’s book, but I’d seen them on TV. I knew they happened somewhere.
After school that day, on the car ride back to our apartment, I decided I wanted the sunrise. I knew I couldn’t have the sunrise or its colors for my own. Some things were too precious not to be shared. They just had to happen, and you just had to make sure you were there when they did, and then, you were part of something with everyone else who showed up at the right time.
The first night I reached for the sun, my mother was expecting company. Mom, R.C., and I usually shared one bed in the studio, but she tucked us kids in on the couch that night. This put a huge kink in my plans. There was a window right behind the bed but not the couch. I’d glimpsed the leftovers of the brilliant painted sky many mornings when I woke up for school, but it wasn’t good enough. I’d convinced myself it would look different, more brilliant, if I stayed up to watch. I wanted the real thing, and I knew I could prove myself worthy to the sky. I want a sunrise, and so it shall be was a natural truth in my child mind, and I did not let go.
The view from the couch wouldn’t do. I tried to stay up anyway, to practice for the night after—but my brother’s warm legs, wrapped up in mine under our blanket, brought on the dense and resolve-melting fog of exhaustion. My mind resisted rest, but all that closeness eventually soothed me to sleep.
 The next morning, I woke up to the sun already in the sky and the television playing. A commercial was running and I caught the words, “Smoking cigarettes will kill you.” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and looked over at the pack of cigarettes sitting in my mother’s black purse. She must not have known. I sat up to tell her, but she wasn’t in the room. I heard noises coming from behind the closed bathroom door, letting me know she was handling private business, but I couldn’t wait for her presence or permission to act. I grabbed the cigarettes from her black purse, opened the small cardboard box, and dumped each one into the trash can full of last night’s dinner, which had been prepared exclusively from cans. When my mother came out of the bathroom, I told her what I’d seen about the cigarettes on TV.
“They could kill you!” My mother rolled her eyes at me, and at the mention of them, began looking for her cigarettes in earnest.
Only then did it occur to me she may not feel relieved I’d already thrown them out.
I watched the panic sweep over her, as my own followed. When we were bad, my mother hit us for it, and there was always the thought that I would die in the back of my mind. I didn’t think my mother wanted to kill me on purpose. It was her eyes. My mother’s rage drained the light from her eyes, and she became unrecognizable to me. There was Mama, the loving mother we knew before whatever sparked her ire, and then there was Mother who showed up in her place. Mother felt separate, somehow apart from our otherwise happy and harmonious existence. She rose from somewhere within Mama and did the latter’s dirty work. Every once in a while, my brother and I were the dirty work needing done.
I sat quietly on the couch watching my mother, trying to be very still. I knew Mama would find her cigarettes in the black trash bag eventually, a few of them ripped in half to ensure their loss. When she did, I was going to get hit, and I was already afraid of the pain.