I wore a dark blue dress with pleats. Hers was white, fitted from just below the collar to just below the navel and below that a bell too big and tissuey to ring. You know the kind. Her palms, white as the white of her actually off-white dress faced her not-quite-husband and the golden light streaming in on the two of them from the yellow stained glass window in front of which they stood seemed to favor those hands above all else in the room. It looked as though her palms were lit up from the inside, fragile things emanating terrified wonder and joy at the man standing before her. There she stood, a silent bell, her delicate hands ringing out as loud as the church bells that lingered less than half an hour old in my ears.
I heard not a single word of the ceremony. I saw nothing but her hands, gold light, off-white, blue pleats. I felt my own hands, palms flat on those pleats. I sat straight and very still. Silent as it seemed, I had the distinct impression that my attendance - that any attendance - was unintended and the wedding itself was only between light and hands.
Lungs fill fast with -
full to cracking with -
Sky once cracked under his curses
Wide open and too blue and
Crisp as the crunch of gold-yellow leaves
Under the soles of my feet
Full with
Christmas under clear clean skies
Beers in the basement on the first cold day
All huddled and hunched and happy
Home under this, wide as the abyss
Lungs full,
Mountains all blue to my right
Across the street I remember springtime letting go, watch the walls melt & never thought How Does It Look, but ____, though we were doing better then, gets mad when I am happy & his anger shakes the world or cracks the sky.
Green walls - I always liked them & now a young girl sings the same song out the windows of his old apartment, the green one, one across the street.
Sing out let go & let your age slip by you like water running off your shoulders, let it touch the back of your neck to know the temperature, keep warm & let your body ease into it.
My house is green too now & the boy I left him for holds me into the night but I oughta be alone, gotta go it alone.
From my view here on the plane it all looks blue - the sky and down through the sky so far away the land looks blue too. I think about my father going to work & going home, carrying his years with him like photos. I wonder what these snapshots hold and what it was he saw and felt that turned him from a James into a Blue.
Is it merely chance that under a blue blue sky in the town where I was born I saw my whole world light up & what I saw most clearly was Blue? Blue sky, blue buildings blue paint and Blue, my father is there so I hop on the back of his motorcycle & see not just blue but green & red & yellow and everything else. The town is alight & then I am crying because yeah, Dad, I don’t know what to say on the phone but how am I supposed to find words for love? Can’t you just feel it? Or don’t you know my love by now?
This was the day I knew that blue was my favorite color. Half a year later I am feeling alone. I feel a big gaping hole in myself. I look around the room I’m going to live in (just as soon as I get a bed) and I see my desk & all my stuff and I see that though I’ve made no conscious change toward this end, all the things I keep around me now happen to be blue, as though just by loving the color I’ve pulled it toward me, and when I see this I am filled with hope. This is the moment I decide to change my life forever and to pull good things toward me the way I have pulled blue things toward me. And this is the moment that, if I were a James, would turn me into Blue.
They show it in the movies. The charming goodbye, the hug, the kiss, the words that, in reality, might be just a little too clever for the moment (but maybe that’s just me, maybe I’m the only one who, at all the right moments, gets stuck with the most simple declarations). My life is not a movie. So the train is gone and I am at a loss for what to do next. Eat, sleep, watch movies. I can’t sleep without hearing a soft phantom snore. I can’t eat. Movies hold too much or hold not enough. My life has suddenly become unreasonably difficult. I am not in a movie, there is no way to tell how it ends or if he will come back to me. Under a sheet last night I was wide awake. Under the sheet I knew that I would someday marry him. Within my flimsy linen casket, I was assured that even if it took more years than I could imagine, even if we had to start all over again over and over, I was laying next to the man I would marry. Sheeted Me knew that this would be long and difficult, but Sheeted Me was brave and shining with hope. I won’t sleep under those sheets again (not by choice, but just because this is Life and we are always moving on and on, from one thing to the next). Without the sheet I can almost touch the difficulties I will have to face before I will wear a ring on my left hand. With the sheet gone, I can feel the weight of all the years it will take. I am still in this for good, but unlike Sheeted Me, I carry my hope too close to my heart, it leaps up into my throat when I cry. Unlike Sheeted Me, I am not brave but afraid of everything.
You are walking to class, taking such a route that I can see you from where I am, but you can’t see me. How many more times will I see you again like this? Perhaps in years to come, I will see you walking and it will really be a ghost of you, as young and strong as ever, no matter how far in the future this may occur. Or perhaps I will go out of my way to see you again & you will be flesh and blood Really You & we will both be older then. But how many times will I ever again spot you by accident, in the same place and time as I am simply because this is where & when we both are for now?
A window into a different world, beautiful and strange - complete with its perfect sunny days & its cold dark winters - shuts in front of me and I am left smiling with tears in my eyes.
❧
I'm a writer if I want it but for years I felt daunted. Words got too heavy, I wasn't ready.
