I Didn't Know by G.B. Fulmer (red seas under red skies TXT) 📕

I didn’t know what that morning was.

I was barely awake. You were sitting on the edge of your golden bed, a flicker of mischief behind your eyes. It was on the verge of being gray outside but somehow a diffused and brilliant light had found its way between buildings, through clotheslines, and onto your face. You absorbed the light, seemed to glow from within, casting your colors on the walls like a child’s revolving night light. Pinks, golds, and blues in kaleidoscopic formations circled the room around me. They would have all been beautifully distracting if I hadn’t already been completely distracted by that hair.

You had this single strand of hair that wouldn’t stay back. It ran down your forehead, got caught in an eyebrow , tangled with an eyelash. It glinted brightly as it neared your eyes, which were the source of the translucent little waves crashing across my chest.

In the blue of your iris I could see smooth gray stones under the surface and was taken back to that Great Lake from my early, magical life. I was on one of my family’s annual vacations to a small northern town at the lake’s edge. The hills rose in the distance behind me. Once again I had been drawn to the beach, its lighthouse, the seagulls overhead. Holding a crusty, vinegar-toothed sandwich in my 10,11,12-year-old, rock-skipping fingers, I sat silently watching the water. Feeling at home in the wonder of bouncing buoys and crying birds, and the miracle of rolling water that had no end in sight.

Your eyes blinked and the scene was gone. You were still looking at me, silliness in your face. That hair that wouldn’t stay back had begun rhythmically catching the light, moving in time with a muffled crunching. It flashed like a mirror signaling for attention. As a glare of light met my eye it made me recall a squint-inducing sun bouncing off the railroad tracks behind my house.

The light was oppressive on that day, it reflected off of everything, sun-bleached stones, train-flattened coins, the tears that were running down my cheeks. I had set off on another adventure, determined to escape the dish-throwing that was going on in my house. I wasn’t far yet, I could still see the twin a-frames over my shoulder, but that day I would make it three towns away and back again without anyone noticing I was gone. A sad victory, but in the moment I felt only a cool wind filling my lungs and soothing the stinging feeling in my head. My own dark curtain of hair was conveniently blown in front of my eyes, shielding them from the blazing sky, and helping to wrap me in my one trusted blanket of comfort, myself.

Your strand of hair slipped out of the light, and your face reclaimed focus, washing away the childhood memory. You were chewing. The scent of dry granola mixing with your sweetly stinky breath. Colors were swimming on your self-sponged walls. A fluttering pink rose petal of light traced a line on your bed and disappeared as it neared its beginning, your mouth, a darker but related shade of that found frosting a perfect piece of inconceivably good cake.

The bakery was small and trimmed in blue, its name written in shiny golden letters on the window. It was filled with the sounds of wax paper grabbing twisted olive bread and cash register tape unfurling. We sat under a doughy air in a cluster of tightly packed tables that mirrored the uncertainty I felt in my chest. But your smile said you liked the cake, the first piece of pink-cake, and as the frosting stuck to your battalion of teeth, a faint cool wind began filling my lungs, and my grip slipped a bit on the hard heart I had created over the previous year.

Your spoon clinked...

I didn’t know what that morning was. I didn’t know why your wayward hair was projecting fragments of my life like a filmstrip onto the walls. And I didn’t have the words to define the feeling that was expanding inside my chest. I just knew that as I sat on that bed with you, colors and light floating around the room, that flicker of mischief growing into a laugh that revealed an oat, a feeling from long ago was slowly coming to the surface of my consciousness. And I woke up to find myself sitting there suddenly still in love with you, being bathed in that feeling from the beach, with the bouncing buoys and crying birds, and the miracle of rolling water that has no end in sight.

Publication Date: 12-31-2008

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