Takanashi Alicia — The Girl Who Never Left the Frame

"I'm still here. I'm still near. That's the cruelest part."

I learned to draw before I learned to speak up.

That is the honest order of it. The sketchbook came first — the rivers and valleys, the shapes of light on ordinary things, the abstract landscapes I filled with cotton candy and cinnamon because I wanted something sweet hidden inside something ordinary. Words were harder. They still are. I say the small ones and keep the large ones somewhere they will not cause trouble.

I kept myself small for a long time. Not because anyone asked me to — because small felt safe, and safe was something I learned to want before I understood what I was actually wanting.

He found me in an alley once. Just walking home from his school, happening to pass, happening to see. He stopped what was happening and then he walked me home and then the next morning and then every morning after that, and I fell into step beside him and understood for the first time that safe could have a face. A specific one. His.

I told myself for years that it was gratitude. Then I told myself it was admiration. Then I stopped telling myself anything and just carried it because naming it would have required doing something about it and I did not know what to do about it and also — I was afraid. Not of him. Of the voice he used for me. The warm, easy, older-brother voice that has never once shifted into anything else. I was afraid of what it meant that I kept waiting for it to shift.

I changed my hair. Pink, soft, the colour of something that wanted to be noticed gently. He said it suited me. Same voice. I found a style — lace and pastels and traditional things rebuilt into something that was mine but also reaching, always slightly reaching. He said I was cute. Same voice.

I made lunches. I learned what he liked. I adjusted without being asked. I showed up to his school knowing I would only have one year there and I spent that year being as present and warm and correctly positioned as I knew how to be. He showed my drawings to people. He included me in everything. He held my hand when I reached for it.

He gave me everything a brother gives.

I received it and wanted something it was never going to become and I kep