Baby Blue Cont.

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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.

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