Salt then Sour then Sweet

Andrea is a nerve: touch them once and an entire cosmos rushes through you. They are a lone constellation in a pitch-black sky, lighting just enough for you to imagine the galaxy you belong to. They remind you of the love pulsing quietly around you—in the shy leaf of a sprout pushing through slushy spring snow, in the cracked scales of an old tree’s bark, in the quick scramble of chipmunks chasing nuts, in the toppled mailboxes leaning by the roadside, in those endless yellow-stitched roads that go everywhere and nowhere. In drifting clouds that part, leaving you drenched in that soft white,

feather-light love that seems to come at you from nowhere and everywhere at once.

Andrea is a sky full of life. But they did not always shine. They had lived inside a darkness with sharp edges, cutting themselves open again and again, hovering at that thin border between here and nowhere. And then came the revelation—devastating in its clarity—that they would no longer be held responsible for taking their life. It was already being taken, cell by cell, by a relentless malignant cancer. Surgery. Chemo. More chemo. Life measured in three-week cycles. And yet in the last few months, documented in Come See Me in the Good Light, Andrea lived more fully than in all the years before—held, loved, seen—by Megan, by Bethy, by Emily, by Heather.

The film presses a finger between your ribs and finds your still-beating heart. It leaves you blinking tears you didn’t know you had stored up.

What is so fleeting of the time we spend on the shores of this great ocean?

What are the ecstasies that bring us to the brink of life that goes on and never stops?

Why do we choose words to the call of the mourning dove?

Why do we hold hands and take that path over the hills?

Why do we lock our eyes and probe each other’s souls?

What does life mean, if anything at all?

We witness their last show—the final one—where the voice they feared would abandon them held steady. Strong. Certain. Like the first light of the fifth morning, like the last leaf that refuses to let go. Their voice guided each poem as if conducting an orchestra they had spent a lifetime assembling, completing the circle where their life and their art finally met.

The applause from that night is still echoing, still reverberating, as if the world is determined not to let it end.