For strong edges, I did a very small brush size and radius, along with a very high density. Then, I reduced the radius and size of the brush to define the edges a little more tightly and continue to fill in areas. I used this to outline all of the major edges and partially fill in. This gave an effect that looked like it was actually brushed on, because details were kind of "pulled" along with the stroke. I set it to follow cursor movement and to an opacity of 25. I started with a blank canvas and started drawing with the scattered line brush with a fairly large radius and size. I don’t remember how she learned my name, or me hers.Click the image to see the impressionized version. I remember the sound of her coming back for me. I remember her regretting she would never have a child. I remember all the one thousand messages we have sent each other between planets. I remember how she said I should try turning toward the stars and compact my body-knees to chest, arms wrapped over, head curled inward-to make my gravity as centered as possible, to make it stronger, so that she might be able to feel it at the distance. I remember how she told me to search for higher ground, always, to not become the fernbird on the bow’s railing, to not become the thing odd as a bird so tired it pants. I remember I remember her trying to explain gravitational waves to me, and how, at whatever the distance, we were sending them toward each other, raptured in the middle they always became, coming back to us in old dizzied forms reflective of our respective memories of the other, our way of speaking, of knowing. I remember her telling me about the daydreams she was having, the ones of me drowning in the ocean. I remember her wishing to break an orbit. I remember her taking photographs every time we visited the beaches of Bandar Abbas, tracking the ocean’s yearly rapid rise as the poles shed their ice. I remember her showing me constellations, I remember her wishing for darker spaces. I remember the shape of her body the first time she showed me, and her mine, and how nothing ever came of it or even seemed possible, it was the kind of thing children do. I remember when her heart was collapsed, by her own doing or that of others, or when mine was, and how we shared in grief. I remember trying to chase her eight-year-old memory through her parents’ estate and feeling like my muscles and my bones were at binaries. I don’t remember much of our earliest times together because we were so young. I don’t remember how she and I met, but I know it happened when our mothers brought us to the same neighborhood bakery on one morning or another. I crawled my way to the top of the hill, grasses aching for the skin of my neck, my bare forearms, and I found myself looking down on an atoll and the last corpse of trees on the island, the others having been swallowed by the sea, high tide saltwater leaving bleached-white rings I could see from a distance, the leaves still wavering in the wind before, I figured, someday soon, their veins would become brackish and varicosed-yellow, and would fall, and would join the other ruin at the bottom of the ocean, but for a moment I wondered what it would mean to die here, to turn the gun against myself and punch clear the envelope that is me, to die here and have my body turned into bones, to have the fernbird watch my death instead of not watch its own-what would it think: a sense of relief, the disappearance of that terrible sensation of being watched a sense of horror, coming to understand there never will be a lover or a brother a sense of openness, a better meaning of the stars-but instead I slid the rifle from my back and to my shoulder, my eye to the scope, the unreal view in infrared-blue meant quiet, resd meant a killing-until I found the punch of color among the branches, my lonely little singsong darling, and I nuzzled my finger against the trigger, and began to ask myself a question all over again-what is it like to kill the last of a thing, against the backdrop of the universe, where does that put one, where among the future accounting, the corridors where judgement will walk and observe, when we are all made museumpieces from a distance, I could even hear its call: you-teek, you-teek, in time opposite the ocean.
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