"..Electricity and all colors were mine.."

He put me in photo albums;

Said,

“this is my favorite page.”

Three photos:

one sunset that made a melancholy town somewhat of a wonder, even for a few brief moment

one epic day his life was saved after a broken heart

one of him and I.

And, like most things in my life, parts of me feel I don’t deserve to occupy that space

*

I dwelled there, in his life like those photos, but like them they are just moments in time, forgotten, dusty with new experiences, I’m fading like those squares of paper in sunlight, out of his life quickly.

I can feel myself giving happy couples who share their dinners dirty looks, scowls of jealously of something I once had.

Or maybe I never had anything.

The night before I left he drank too much and flirted with boys. I wasn’t at the center of his world anymore, and I wouldn’t be from there on, and I knew. So I told him I was just going to go, expected him to chase after me because most boys would have.

But he is not most boys.

Fits of passion were ours every night for a short intense month before I moved on to a new life. I remember thinking…this is bad…why are you doing this to yourself when you’re about to move on?

So instead we spent nights exploring things new to both of us. His kiss was hesitant at first, unsure and unfamiliar with the taste of a woman, but he grew hungrier for it, insatiable and I loved consuming him.

*

“I’ve only read this poem aloud to one other person.”

I’m lying next to him, breathless and waiting for the first words. He flips open to a section of an old book with a damaged spine and stained pages, a photograph bookmarks it, a photograph I had taken with my Polaroid, of him. He cradles the book in his palms, almost as if he is holding a baby chick or delicate egg before breaking it into a pan before poaching. His fingers are nimble and careful, the way they are with cooking, and holding chopsticks, the same way they are when he holds pieces of fish between them to feed me. He is grace incarnate.

*

And now I’m angry, I’m sad and angry. Angry that the things I want to write about, I cannot find the eloquence to, but with him, words flow like blood from a fresh wound, in the way blood does, pulsing from an open gash where the heart pumps it through the body and out past severed skin.

Baby Blue Cont.

***

Bedroom doors seemed unreachable in the abyss of a dark hallway when I was younger. The ten foot journey was dark and confining, enveloped me until I reached my parents bedroom where my father would be flopped on one side, the sheet barely covering his shoulder, mouth open, exhaling sighs of exhausted sleep, my mother curled beside him, silent. The searing panic in my throat would lessen but the itch of apprehension hovers in from of me. If you blink, they may disappear. The warmth of two bodies on either side of me was my only consolation, the same warmth that penetrated me in their embrace.

But I did not have the same options anymore. “You’re a big girl, Halle,” my father would tell me. Pillow under my small arm, I pulled Baby Blue off of my bedspread it onto the stiff carpeting. Baby Blue absorbed the rest of the worry from my conscious as I there pillow situated towards my parent’s door so if I opened my eyes I would see the rise and fall of the bedding to know they hadn’t left me only waking if jostled from my father scooping me off the floor, Baby Blue wrapped like a sarong around my waist. He would swipe the bangs off of my damp forehead and out of my eyes, tell me he loved me and return me to my own sea of sheets.

***

I like to forget I’m an adult and that day I was 20 years old, alone and wandering through the children’s sections of Barnes and Nobel, see silhouettes of a little girl with a bob haircut ending sharply at her chin in blissful ignorance. The reading corner was a glare of reds, blues, yellows and greens, like a yard competing for the best Christmas lights display. Dog-eared books with thin, frayed bindings littered the alphabet carpet amongst the various sized pillows. The space between my eyebrows ached from sensory overload but the small of young breath kept me there.. Feeling displaces I picked a purple corduroy pillow to sit on, ignoring the unidentifiable stain near the center. I still wonder what made me sit there: maybe searching for the same excitement I had as a child settled in those spaces with my parents, where they would read books they could probably recite from memory.

“Ok, ok but Mommy has to go home to cook dinner soon, so make it a short one,” ten glossed pages of watercolors dotted with a few sentences of large, bold font. My mother would roll her eyes as I’d approach because she’d know the cover better than anyone that worked in those bookstores. I never even noticed if she bothered to pretend to read what she already knew. Wandering those spaces induces homesickness for a place that doesn’t exist anymore. We find ourselves wishing for simpler times of sidewalk chalk and sugary drinks. Maybe I’m full of shit because I can’t handle the thought of leaving the child in me behind.

***