My father taught me that teardrops look like sapphire in the moonlight. His shadow was blue against my bedroom wall, and his face, dimly illuminated, looked pale and soft. I reached up to touch his cheek, and laughed in surprise at the rough stubble.
    My mother graced the doorframe, her long hair pale and endless in the darkness. She had a young girl's figure, something I noticed with a child's dim acknowledgment. She looked in at us and smiled. Sometimes I saw the sorrow in her eyes, most times I did not.
    My father went to her and put his hand on her waist, just below her breast, and I noted it with some peculiarity. Funny, the things that stay with you. They talked softly, leaning into each other. I turned my attention to the window. It wasn't that their intimacy made me uncomfortable, it simply held no interest for me. With my singular amusement turned away, I did not see my mother's cheeks fall, bathed in tears, nor her chest fill and empty with slow deliberation.
    I saw her once after that, caught in a moonbeam. Unlike Barrie's version of a mother, her sweetest kisses were for always for my father, always for me. She held none of herself in mystery, and that is why I loved her. She left me slowly, and her dying words to me faded with the evening vapor before they ever reached me.
    The only experience of importance with my father--the only one you need to hear to understand who I am--happened on a beach. I was sixteen, and I was about to leave him for the first time for college. He wanted to watch the sunset with me. As the golden light faded on the western horizon, he told me,
    "Everything good in life will fall to pieces--everything--before they come together in a pattern more beautiful than whence they shattered."
    At that moment, the sun chose to burst into a million fragments of light. They fell upon ten thousand grains of sand, they alighted on ten thousand mortal beating hearts. Two found my eyes, and I have never been the same. The ocean, all at once warm, all at once still, was lit by broken pieces of the sun. All my passion for that twilight, my love for my father, my hunger for a new and mysterious world suddenly thrust upon me, is here only separated by commas.
    My father held my hand, and, a moment later, he let me go.