Blue Eyed Years

5 years earlier

When I met you, you were watching me from between your hedges, peering through branches and leaves. Your eyes were blue, the skin of a robin’s egg, polished and smooth. I waved when I saw you, your bright yellow shirt easily visible through the fledgling bushes. You waved back, sheepishly, an automatic response before you dropped from view, quick as a stone.

“Mother, who’s that?” I said, tugging on Mother’s itchy sweater.

“Mrs. Scarborough,” she said without turning around. She was juggling two boxes and our ugly pink lamp. I stared at the back of her head.

“No, really,” I asked again, tripping over my own feet as I hurried after her.

“Who?” she said, dropping her load into the foyer and turning on me, blowing bangs out of her eyes in an overly huffy manner.

“Him,” I said, pointing out the door to where you had been hiding. Mother threw her hands up. She turned and marched back to the moving van, where Father was chatting amiably with a dark-haired man with spectacles and a scruffy tie.

When I looked again at the hedges, you were watching me again, the only part of you visible was your black hair and blue eyes.

At dinner I tried to ask Mother about you again, but she only sniffed and continued to cut her microwaved steak.

“Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to your father,” she scolded, raising her head to glare at me. I stared into the whiteness of store bought mashed potatoes and pictured the vividness of your eyes, wide and unnaturally clear.

“That’s Mr. and Mrs. Scarborough’s son,” Father answered me, shaking his head to break the tough sinews of his steak.

“They have a son?” Mother paused her cutting to look at Father.

“Yes, I believe he’s ten. He’s the spitting image of his father, though, you should see-”

“No, his eyes are robin’s egg blue, not old library book brown like Mr. Scarborough’s eyes,” I interrupted, the words flowing like a geyser, unstoppable.

“I told you not to interrupt me!” Mother seethed, waving her fork in the air. Her steak, still firmly impaled, decided to fly off at this moment and hit the electric white kitchen wall with a messy splatter. Mother let out a wail of frustration and shook her finger at me.

“I think you should go to your room,” Father said to me gravely, chewing his steak deliberately and reaching for his glass of water.

“I didn’t interrupt her,” I muttered under my breath. “She wasn’t even talking.”

On the way up the stairs I found a tiny glass bead tucked on a step. It was green like a sea processed emerald, dusty and vibrant like a coalition of clouds drifting across a field of grass. For no reason at all I saw your face again, and the blueness of your eyes, the immediate complement to my new little ocean of green.

4 years earlier

The first night of summer I couldn’t fall asleep, so I opened my window and crawled out to sit on the ledge, my head propped awkwardly against the raised window, bare legs clenched to the sandpapered shingles. I stared at your window, so close I could’ve sworn that if the wind blew me I would tumble straight through its open expanse.

“Can’t sleep?” you asked, your face a pale oval appearing silently at the window. My heart jumped erratically; maybe it was at your sudden appearance, or maybe it was simply you.

“No, you?” I whispered back. You shrugged. The night was dripping with silence. Below me, the ground drained into a mass of darkness. Your hands gripped the sill, your nails painted periwinkle blue, and your face bobbed farther out of the shadows. The utter baby blue of your sleepy eyes caused my heart to slide upwards, banging into my throat like a baby bird demanding to be released home to fate. My heart beat hard against the coldness of the air. In the year I had moved here, we had only exchanged pleasantries- at fourteen years old, in our strange school, it had still been considered highly scandalous for girls to talk to boys, much less be friends. You were shy, and I was so compounded by the sheer prettiness of your eyes that together we didn’t stand a chance of maintaining actual conversation.

“Your nails are blue,” I said, as stupidly blinded by the blueness of your eyes as I had been from the start.

Your face turned red.

“It was a dare,” you mumbled. “My friends tricked me and painted them when I was sleeping.”

I stared up at the sky and pretended I had never opened my big fat mouth.

“It’s been a while since anyone’s moved into your house,” you said, randomly, after a while, the mortification mostly gone from the vibrations of your throat.

“What do you mean,” I whispered back, tilting my head back down to look you in the eye. I watched as you blinked, your dark eyelashes shadowing those beautiful eyes.

“The last time someone moved into your house was five years ago. They only stayed for a week before they packed up,” you explained. You craned your neck farther out the window, closer to me.

“Why?” I looked over my shoulder into the dark recesses of my room.

You shrugged.

Silence fell again, draping you in comfort and me in itchiness. You liked the silence, didn’t you? There was always some little corner of peace coloring your irises whenever we sat in silence. I never did understand it; my brain craved for noise as signs of living.

Finally, you stretched out a pale, freckled arm until your dry fingers quivered an inch from my knee.

“How do you sit like that, and not be afraid?” you asked. Your eyes were a little gray now, tinged with that bubble of peace, softer in color yet more like ice.

I shrugged, looking down at the ground far below. “It’s like this,” I said, out loud now, enjoying the harshness of my voice on the quiet night. “It’s just air down there, between me and the ground. Some people think of it as nothing, like you’re hovering above nothing, one twitch from falling.” You nodded, your eyes turning blue again at the sound of my words. “But I feel safe up here, like the air is lifting me up, protecting me from the ground. You know?”

You shrugged, “Not really.” You let your fingers fall down, towards the ground, driven by the easy magnetism of gravity.

When the eerie quiet threatened to strike again, I coughed loudly, and you flinched at the sound, your eyes turning slate and then blue over and over again like a lighthouse show. You didn’t speak, and the nothingness of the night sank into my throat, the heaviest winter blanket of all.

“I think I’m going to sleep now,” I finally whispered, my throat dusty. You nodded. I sat for another half minute, staring down at the ground, until finally I manipulated my legs through the window and dropped onto the carpet.

“Good night,” I said, reaching for the ugly puce curtains. They framed your face for a split second before they ate away your ears, and then your eyes, and the pointy crookedness of your freckled nose.

“Good night,” you whispered, barely audible to me as I stood still as a statue in front of the closed curtains. Adrenaline rushed through my blood, hot and brilliant until it subsided into sweetness as I thought of your face, your voice, the words you had said. I dreamed of blue M&Ms and raspberry popsicles, the silky blue of my new woolly scarf, and a never ending ocean of green dolphins weaving through cotton candy clouds.

3 years earlier

I didn’t see you all summer.

“He’s at camp,” your mother said when I knocked on the door, politely asking if you were home. Mother had sent me with cookies; she’d been in a good mood and had decided to be neighborly. “I’ll tell him you came over when he gets back tonight!”

I pictured you there, surrounded by baby robins, leaving behind their cracked blue shells, blue like a diluted twilight dust.

Didn’t you notice, when you came back at night, the cleanness of the sky? The moon came out and the stars shone like little tiny scratches, dripping silver blood. I refused to surrender myself to sleep, and instead sat on the ledge once more, staring into the sky and your window, which darkened as the night drained on.

I fell asleep when darkness shattered the night into a million little pieces, the storm right before the calm, my head against the window, hands gripping the sill, my face still angled towards your window. When dawn swept the night away, escorting sunlight and morning, you found me there, still sleeping, balanced precariously on the tiny ledge.

“Azalea,” you whispered, and I awoke at once, my legs tingling with the heaviness of blood. “Azalea, get off before you fall,” you said, gesturing urgently in my direction.

I struggled to pry my voice out, combing my brain furiously for your name.

“I’m okay,” I said at last, the words finally emerging from the black hole of my stomach. I rubbed my eyes and stretched my legs carefully.

“You wouldn’t be, if you’d fallen,” you said, staring down at the ground so far below.

“I wouldn’t have fallen,” I protested, adrenaline pumping sleep away. “Good thing you were looking out for me, though.” You flushed red, the primary color opposite of your cerulean eyes. You ducked back under the window frame, into the recess of your room, your eyes still glimmering awkwardly from the dark.

“Actually, I wanted to know if you wanted to see a movie sometime,” you finally said, your words tumbling over each other like shattered marbles. In the shallowness of the night, your foggy breath tingled as if it were alive, and your cheeks faded to pink now as you began to back away. I stared, mesmerized by your slow, careful blinking, as if you were holding your breath, waiting for me to answer.

“That’d be nice,” I whispered, as loud as my rasping voice would allow me, watching your smile emerge and disappear like lightning in the night sky.

“Friday, after dinner,” you said, your voice barely audible as you slid the window shut. Talk to you later, you mouthed, before darkness swallowed your face.

In the unbearable silence following, the night swelled into life, as if nothing had ever existed in the quiet before those beautiful blue eyes.

2 years earlier

“Daniel,” I said, throwing a paper clip at your window. You looked up from your desk, which you’d put under the window at the beginning of the year.

“Yes?” Your eyes glowed like electric LED lights.

“Do you think my parents love each other?” I said, shaking my hair from a blue elastic.

“I don’t know,” you answered, honest, forehead crinkled into a million little lines.

“They do,” I exclaimed, suddenly harsh. The coldness in my heart was taking over again- it had been happening, on and off, on and off, while I fell in love with you. My twenty three hours were for you, the last for the frigid demands of my hapless parents.

Lately their words, no different than ever, were striking my heart in little tiny sparks of fire, easing the cold in with a lie of heat. Shut up, and don’t interrupt, and stupid lingered in my cells. 

I leaned forward to watch the shadows battle the light on the plane of your cheek.

“Azalea?” you asked, and the light of your eyes softened into molten lakes, still bright blue after all this time. I met your eyes, and felt the ice melt as I looked into your eyes, so clear and so trusting I’d never had to build the walls so many girls had constructed around their hearts.

“Come on, I’m going to teach you to sit on the windowsill,” I smiled, relaxing as the creases of your forehead smoothed themselves into tan skin again. You shook your head, visibly afraid, but I’d leaned out the window and threatened to throw myself off if you didn’t slide carefully onto your windowsill.

We sat in silence. The night had always been like this with you, full of quiet, the same contented texture of your half asleep eyes.

“You teach me this at least once a month,” you say at last, gingerly stretching a leg to touch my ankle.

“You never get used to it,” I shrug, “and thus the lessons continue.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re a horrible teacher,” and this time your eyes are laughing, crinkling at the corners like candy wrappers.

Somewhere in the house I hear Mother screaming, and then Father’s exasperated voice drifting through her shouts. You’re watching me, silently, even as I cringe and try to smooth my nerves, my foot bumping yours in a nervous pattern.

“Gotta go,” I whispered, feeling the cold drift through my chest. I can’t even meet your eyes, and for this reason, tears rise to mine.

“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” you said, quietly, before your eyes turned dark like promises and blue fingernails. The world stops the way it only does for you and it takes effort to climb back inside, close the window, draw the curtain closed on your sad, sad face.

“So are you,” I said, silently into the curtains, barely breathing, trying my best to fit into the scratchy silence I had imposed upon myself.

I could feel you through the layers as you stared me down forever. When forever ended, you took a breath, and even then I knew that time had played a joke on me again.

1 year earlier

In the winter Mother and Father got divorced.

“It’s for the better,” Mother said, smoking silvery rings on her new cigarettes. It was a new habit of hers.

“Stop smoking, Marie,” Father scolded. His chin was scrubby with his week old beard, and his kind eyes had paled a little, celery pale green. Mother rolled her eyes.

“You’re already divorced?” I said, shocked. Father looked down at his hands. Mother nodded, clearly missing the element of shame Father was feeling.

“I’m sorry, Azalea,” Father began, “we should have told you-”

“Don’t be silly,” Mother interrupted, “Anthony, we agreed not to tell her! We shouldn’t have told her! You know how she would have-”

“She’s our child!”

“You’re always taking her side! Why do you never see my side of things?” Mother screamed, shaking the cigarette. Ashes fell to the floor, flickering and dying. My head pounded, and I flashed back to that day I had first seen you, when Mother had flung her fork in the air and the steak had hit the wall and left a greasy mark that was still there. Father glared at Mother, who only glared back, and then suddenly both started yelling at each other, loud and cold and so explosive my skin hurt to be near them.

I smacked my hands on the table and stood up, feeling the rage in my palms.
“Shut up, both of you,” I screamed. My face felt stretched and my mouth worked in slow motion, the pounding in my brain taking a vicious turn. Father and Mother stared at me, mouths gaped open like two astonished toddlers seeing fireworks for the first time.
“Azalea,” Father finally admonished at the same time as Mother, whose voice was less patient and sharper.
“Both of you.” I repeated, my breath short, little spurts of red hot air. “Both of you can leave me alone, because I’m sick of hearing you argue! I’m sick of all the drama! And I can’t believe you were both selfish enough to just go ahead and get divorced without telling me.”
Neither Mother or Father said anything for a very long time.
I left the room. I left the house, my feet tearing shadows from the night as I swallowed and swallowed so that the darkness filled my body and the pain slid away as easy as blue confetti in the breeze.
You were there, standing, waiting, blue eyes silvery under the moon, watching me charge up to you, fire and crowded darkness bursting through my pores.  
“Let me help,” you said, and touched my hair, so gentle my insides fell apart as I struggled to let you go.
Your face changed as I spat out words, from a beautiful belonging to me into a beautiful that no longer was mine. There was nothing in your eyes as I said goodbye, tears dripping silently down my cheeks, explaining the coldness in my heart and the love it ate away.
I intended to walk away from you, I really did. But when I stopped speaking and looked for your eyes, you turned and walked away, loping strides and tense shoulders that broke my heart even as yours shattered.

now

It is easy to sum my entire existence into one color: the periwinkle, robin-egg, cerulean sky, brilliant M&M color of your eye.

I see you from all the corners of my heart.

I have loved you and love you and will love you, but it no longer matters.

You walk down the street, your arm around one of our distant friends, a green-eyed, red-haired girl who put the beauty back into your smile.

My heart breaks the tiniest bit, but I straighten and let the curtains fall over your combined figures. I would persevere. You had taught me to sit in silence, to breathe colors, to love.

I store you away into the farthest corner of my heart and pick up my suitcase, moving out the door and into the car.

As the dust settles beyond my tires, only the blue sky ahead of me stops me from looking back.