_{I always told you I wished I looked like Dad. Broad shoulders, think arms, and full mustache combined with the calves of bulls and wrinkles of wisdom. With one glance strangers knew I was your son. I’m your sculpture, molded with a thin face, small mouth, skinny frame, and light brown hair. The only difference is my recessive blue eyes contrasting your muddy brown. Doctors, teachers, friends, and family all admired the sculptor’s sculpture. “So similar,” “just alike,” “spitting image,” I’ve heard it all. I used to despise these words. You’re a girl and I was a boy, I cannot look like a girl. That’s why Dad was always my first choice. He seemed rugged, tough, and manly. His coarse hands and crow’s feet painted his hard work in his skin. But you… you wore dresses, had soft hands, covered your wrinkles, and hid your height with your high heels. No, I could not look like you… it’s just not right.
Now your sculpture has matured. It has gained height, surpassing Dad, deepened its voice, broadened its skull, and brightened the blue of its eyes. I did not just look anymore…I saw. Instead of looking at you and seeing a girl, I now saw past the dresses, soft hands, washed wrinkles, and heels. Instead there stood the Sculptor, the one who not only molded my skin but also my mind.
Every action you performed brightened those blues. When you gave that homeless man, dirt brown, crusty clothed, and lazy eyed your Wendy’s ninety-nine cent crispy chicken sandwiches and then said, “I’d rather give him food than money because he has to eat the food and the money would probably be wasted on liquor,” or the countless times I begged you to let us go home after school while you worked two, three, and sometimes even four hours after all the other teachers had left. “I have to make sure the centers are ready,” “everything has to be perfect for the sub,” or “I’m almost done I just have to do this last thing,” were your usual responses, especially the last and one for multiple “last things.” Each time you carved these memories in the blues with your tools, deepening the shades and scarring the past so I cannot escape it.
Then the sculptor’s hands were weakened and yet strengthened. The strokes came less often yet in powers tenfold before. As the sculpture came to take care of sculptor the intricate patterns and final pokes of perfection bloomed. Instead of musty men and late night classrooms the sights were swiveled. Hospital beds, ports, IV tubes, Relays for Life, countless crosses, teal tears, true strength, doused dreams, morphine masks, panicked pain, tortured teachers, and fallen friends scarred the blues deeper than ever before.
But you were not finished, not yet. Seeing the pain in your eyes those last days did not scar but burnt my own. I stood at your side night after night but you did not know. I was washed out by the whisper of your many friends and the cold coma-like prison you entered. I held your hand limp, hopeful for a grasp. We brought you home just like you wished and Bruce even licked your wrist. He had missed you so much. The sight of you choking on your own breath haunts my mind, pulling your whole head back for a desperate dip of oxygen. The nurse said we had hours but you argued saying only minutes. We surrounded you. Dad, Josh, Zack and I held your hands and your sisters and mom rested at your feet.  Then you just stopped choking, the air fell silent, and you said good bye. Now when I look into the mirror I hear those people’s words and I am glad that I don’t look like Dad.}