I’ve been tagging since I was thirteen. Back then I wouldn’t have even called it tagging because I just had some Sharpies and a will to have my name on every block. Then, Alé bought me a can of blue spray paint for my fourteenth birthday and I spent a month going wild with it before I shook it one day and it was empty. It became a tradition; a new color for every birthday since.
Marcus was the one who took me on bike rides and told me that there really ain’t no difference between the murals and swirling tags we’d pass, that art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us. He says that’s what his lyrics are for.
When I was fifteen, in the first months when it was just the two of us, we’d bike to pick up the cheapest groceries, shove them into backpacks, and bring them back to the apartment. I’d always be the one to cook, if we bought anything worth cooking. Marcus would take his Skittles to the couch.
One day, about a month into belonging to Marcus, he decided that we were gonna have to be innovative if we wanted to make enough to afford the Farmer Joe’s type of groceries and not the Grocery Outlet type of groceries. He decided we’d start selling our art. He hadn’t met Cole yet, so he didn’t have a way to record his music, which meant that I would be the one to start us out by painting cardboard with paint we picked up for a dollar per tube at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. It’s the only reason we ever bothered riding into Temescal, a neighborhood that boasts its pistachio ice cream like they aren’t settling the land and calling it entrepreneurship.
I started coming home from school and finding Marcus sitting in our spot on the carpet with my cardboard and secondhand paint spread out in front of him, ready to hand me a brush. It was the best thing Marcus could’ve done for me, giving me the colors. Sometimes I even dared to think I could be more than his sister, could be the kind of artist who had a frame for her art.
We started taking my paintings out on the weekends, offering them at twenty bucks each. Marcus said this was the going rate, but nobody was buying them. Weekend after weekend, we stood exposed in the sun, bartering the price down until finally a couple old women took pity on us and bought a few paintings at five dollars each. I apologized to Marcus and he kept saying it was fine even though I knew it wasn’t. He spent a couple nights at Lacy’s and came back with a tight smile. I haven’t really painted since then, not more than a swirling tag on a bus stop or portraits of Alé with my birthday paint.
I raise the green up to the wall, far enough away I can see it spray through the air for that millisecond before it makes contact with the cement. It sounds like the ocean if it was manufactured, if we could control a wave. Holding it, the metal can starting to boil in this early spring heat flash, I have never felt more like I belonged somewhere.
I paint my recurring dream: the one where I’m in the meadow, where everything’s ripe and it’s like every cell in each blade of grass has come alive. I tell Marcus to paint the flowers: yellow, petals on petals on petals until you cannot separate one from the other.
On top of the grass, inside of the grass, really, I start to paint the girl. I shake my can and hold it to the wall, then think again. I switch the can to my other hand, getting closer to the wall, and trace the outline of the girl who is me and isn’t. This girl is younger and her mouth is open, wide open.
I tell Marcus to paint the girl a yellow dress too. I want her to look like she’s melting into the flowers. My closet is void of anything this kind of vibrant, but my dream tells me that this is the color I will be buried in, mouth gaping. My hands are a mess of green and brown and yellow and now I add blue, moving the can farther from the wall. I’m not tall enough to reach as far up as I need to, but Marcus lifts me from the legs so I am taller than even he is, making sky on an overpass wall.
Behind us, one of the tents unzips. Marcus puts me down at the sound and we turn to two young women climbing out of their shelter. I stand with my hands up, paint as blood.
“What you doin’ out there?” one of them asks, and I realize the cloth draped across her body is a sling and not a scarf. A small child whines softly.
“Ain’t mean no harm. We just painting,” Marcus calls out, putting his stained hands out in front of him. We always showing people our hands like it’s proof we’re human.
The other woman’s eyes squint and I don’t know if that’s directed at us or if the sun’s just too bright. “You finish that and don’t come around here no more, waking the baby up and shit.”