SHOW ME CÉZANNE.

I didn't know why these were the ones. Klimt's gold leaf and flattened bodies. Monet's water going soft at the edges like it couldn't commit to a shape. Dalí's clocks giving up on time. Cézanne's apples that refused to sit still on the table. When I took art history senior year, I sat through the whole survey. The marble and the martyrs, the perfect symmetry of the Renaissance. Waiting, without knowing I was waiting, for the room to tilt into color that turned dreamlike. Impressionism. Post-impressionism. Art nouveau, symbolism, surrealism, fauvism. These were the names I underlined.

It kept happening. At the National Gallery in DC, in museums in Florence and Madrid and Munich. I'd walk past centuries of technically superior work to stand in front of the paintings where the colors were exploring more fanciful territory. I never asked myself why. I just went where I went, pulled toward the same paintings again and again, like they'd already staked a claim.

Before any of that, there was a wooden case. Heavy, pale, the kind that unfolded into shelves of color when you opened it. Mini tubes of acrylic and oil paint, sticks of oil pastel, colored pencils in gradients that ran the full length of the spectrum. Packed in so tightly that if you didn't return everything to its exact slot, the case wouldn't close. It never closed easily. Things fell out. My parents gave me sets like this for birthdays, for Christmas. I don't think I understood until much later that it was one of the most beautiful gifts anyone ever gave me — not the painting kits themselves, but the repeated insistence that I should have them.

I loved the oil pastels most. The way color came off them thick and immediate, more like touching something than drawing it.

Years later, in a community college drawing class, our instructor asked us to choose a famous painting and reproduce a study of it in oil pastel. I ended up going with San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk. The church dissolving into its own reflection. The sky doing that thing his skies do where evening looks less like an hour and more like a mood — and reaching for it without a second thought.

Three years after that, in Venice for the second time, I found the actual church. Late November, the kind of cold that gets into your coat. The sky over the water was pink, not Monet's orange-gold, the buildings warmed instead toward the soft rust of golden hour. It didn't match. I stood there anyway, cold, doing the quiet math of it — that I had studied this view once already, in pastel, in a classroom, before I ever stood in front of it. That I'd been let loose with color as a kid, in a wooden case that never closed right. Long before I understood that this was the beginning of a pattern I would keep completing without noticing.

I didn't know, standing at that canal, that there was an earlier version of this story I hadn't been told yet.

I was at the dining table, mid-sentence in another essay, when I asked my mom if she still had the journal. The one from the year of the miscarriage, before the twin pregnancy that became me and my sister. She was lying on the cushion at the bay window, reading, the way she does most afternoons. We dug through a drawer underneath her bed, where the old journals live, sorting through a small stack until we found it. The cover had a Klimt print on it, gold leaf, a woman's face tilted into pattern. We decided to bring it with us — we were headed out to eat batchoy at the place here in Iloilo that makes the best one. We figured we'd have time to look through it in the car.

That's when she said it. Not about the miscarriage. About the book.

She said the cover reminded her of something — an art book, thick, not a regular children's book, that my dad had brought home when we still lived in Daly City. She said my sister and I used to reach for it whenever she sat us down to practice reading, in the middle of the day, out of every book in the house. That we'd match paintings to names before we could really talk.

I didn't remember any of it. For days after, I kept going to her with questions — yelling from one room to another the way we always do when I'm mid-essay and need to check a detail. What did the book look like, how old were we, are you sure it was that one — the way you keep touching a bruise to see if it's really there.

Here is what I know about that book: nothing, firsthand. I have no memory of its cover, its weight, the shelf it lived on. I don't remember my own finger landing on a page, or my sister's beside it. Everything I have is my mother's, told to me secondhand, and I'm writing it down anyway. The way you'd write down a story about your own birth — true, yours, and entirely borrowed.

She remembers it was an art history book, not written for children at all — full names, full paintings, no cartoon version of anything. Klimt wasn't in it, she thinks, which means whatever pulled me toward him came later, from somewhere else. But Monet was. Degas. Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, Dalí. She remembers the names being difficult, French mostly, and no way to check herself against anything. She just tried, and kept trying, because we kept reaching for the book.

That's the detail that stayed with her. That we reached for it. Out of a house full of books meant for us — the ones with rhymes, with animals, with pictures sized for small hands — my sister and I kept choosing the one that wasn't. She'd sit us down in the middle of the day to practice reading, and we'd request it by pointing, before we had the language to explain why.

She'd say a name, and one of us would find the painting. She doesn't remember which of us was faster, or whether we split the artists between us. She only remembers being struck by it — two toddlers, fascinated, matching brushstrokes to sounds neither of us could yet pronounce ourselves.

She thinks it might have been the colors. I think that's probably right, but I'll never know for certain. Because the only witness who could confirm it was too young to keep the memory. I only get to have the aftermath — a senior year art history class where certain names lit up on the page like I'd met them before. Decades of walking straight past technically superior paintings toward the ones doing something stranger with light, and no idea, until she told me, that any of it started here.

My mother believes the book arrived by accident. My father used to drive for a living, picking up donations somewhere around San Francisco, back when we lived in Daly City, a version of our lives I only know through photographs. She thinks someone had given away a box that happened to have that book inside it. And my father, seeing it, brought it home the way he brought home most things in those years. Because it crossed his path, because he could, because we were his kids and he liked showing up with something in his hands.

He did this often enough that it became its own kind of ritual. We'd hear the door and come running, not only for him, but for whatever he was carrying. Toys, mostly. Books. In the photographs from that apartment, the living room floor is barely visible. Piles too big to have come from birthdays alone. The kind of abundance that builds up when someone's daily route keeps putting new things in front of them and they keep saying yes on your behalf.

I don't think my parents set out to raise an artist. I don't think there was a plan behind that particular book ending up in that particular box on that particular day. It was luck, mostly — my father in the right place, a stranger's box, a route that could have gone a hundred other ways. But it didn't. It came home with him, entered the pile, and my sister and I, given countless options, kept choosing it anyway, for reasons none of us understood yet.

I think about that sometimes now — how much of what shaped me was never intended as shaping. My parents didn't hand me a future. They handed me a floor full of things they'd gathered without knowing exactly which one would matter, only that something might, and let me decide what to do with it. It happens to be one of the more generous things anyone has ever done for me, and it took almost thirty years for me to notice.

My mother has never, in my memory, gone very long without making something. Sewing, embroidery, cross-stitch, quilting, beaded work she'd hunch over for hours under a lamp. Scrapbooking, paper crafts, journals often filled completely in handwriting I'd know anywhere, but sometimes with a ton of blank pages leftover. She doodles leisurely, has for as long as I can remember, with a collection of fine-point markers she collects like other people collect jewelry. She gardens the way some people compose — considering color, height, what blooms against what. She cooks and bakes with the same care. Even her clothes, back then, looked considered. White blouses crisp from being ironed. Floral dresses with a fitted bodice and a skirt that stopped just above the knee. A small universe of sandals to match whatever she'd decided the day called for.

I didn't think of any of this as art while it was happening. It was just what she did, the way some mothers run or read or watch a particular show — I thought I was watching a hobby, several hobbies, a woman who liked to stay busy. It didn't occur to me until much later that I was watching a sensibility. That she wasn't just filling time. She was making decisions about color and form constantly, in every medium she touched, whether or not anyone called it that.

Her favorite artist is Klimt — The Kiss, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the gold leaf, the way he flattens a body into pattern until it's more ornament than anatomy. She wasn't introduced to him through that book; he wasn't in it, she thinks. Whatever brought her to him arrived some other way, some other day. I like him too, probably because during art history class we had a lesson on Art Nouveau and there he was.

That, maybe, is the real inheritance. Not one book, one memory, one afternoon of matching names to paintings. A whole way of being in a room — noticing texture, noticing color, treating an ordinary Thursday as something worth making beautiful. I grew up inside that without knowing it was anything. I didn't learn it. I absorbed it before I had a word for what it was.

I used to think I knew when I started taking photographs. Ten years old, a family trip to Angels Camp, staying at a timeshare with my whole extended family for a few days. One hot, sunny afternoon we hiked through the forest by a river, and my aunt had a little point-and-shoot camera slung around her wrist. I asked her what she was doing. She showed me how to hold it, how to press the button without shaking the frame, and I spent the rest of the hike photographing whatever caught my eye. Bark, water, the way light broke through leaves. I thought that was the beginning.

Then I found the photo. Me at three years old, sitting beside my mother, holding a camera up to my face. The bulky kind, the kind that took film. Held backwards, my eye pressed against the wrong end of it. That camera is the same one my mother used for every photo in the family collection we still have, the one that recorded all of it before any of us knew we'd want to look back. I don't remember holding it. I don't remember wanting to. But there I am, three years old, already reaching for the thing before I understood what it was for.

By the time I reached eleventh grade, I didn't need anyone to hand me anything anymore. A teacher mentioned it once, in passing, the way people mention things that turn out to matter more than they meant them to. A program within the county school system, open to any student willing to apply: the Arts & Communications Academy. Half the school day spent in concentrated study of visual arts, music, or theater, the rest spent in regular classes like everyone else. My sister heard about it too. We both decided, separately and at the same time, that we wanted in.

The application wasn't complicated, though it felt enormous. A portfolio, and an in-person meeting — some small project, done on the spot, so they could see how you worked and not just what you'd already made. I don't think, looking back, that they were especially strict about who they let in. I think they mostly wanted to meet us, to see where our interest actually lived.

I didn't know that at the time. I picked out a more formal outfit. I remember exactly how I did my hair that day, though I couldn't tell you why it mattered so much except that it did. I chose a binder I thought looked artsy, slid my photographs into the plastic sleeves in an order I'd deliberated over, trying to build something that looked like proof. Proof that I was already what I was applying to become.

I got in. Visual arts, concentration in photography. My sister got in too, music, the only female guitarist in the entire music department that year. Neither of us had been taught, by that point, to love what we loved. We'd simply arrived at the door already carrying it, and asked, formally, for permission to keep going.

The program doesn't exist anymore, last I heard. I think about that sometimes. How lucky the timing was, how much of what became mine depended on a school district offering something for a handful of years, in the specific years I happened to need it. But by then, it almost didn't matter what door it was. My sister and I had already decided, on our own, that we were going to walk through it, as a guitarist and a photographer.

All of it, if I trace it back far enough, starts with my mother. My origin and source of my creative spirit.