My Life In Blue (A Pseudo-Autobiographical Account Of An Incomplete Life)

The following is a story I wrote in my head/on my phone as I was picking out a Christmas tree with my father one Monday night last year. It proves to be one of my favorite short pieces I have written, so I decided to post it.

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I suppose I could relate this feeling to that of jumping in a pool of water. I also suppose you might understand this a little better if you were aware that I can’t swim; my first deficiency as a human. Instead of temperate chlorine-filled pool-water it's glacial, so cold it hurts, and I begin spiraling down. It's refreshing as well as nerve-damaging and I panic as I don’t have a choice; I don't know how to resurface.
I am drowning, but in the midst of sinking I am dancing and smiling- deep indigo, the color of my mother’s dress that she wore when we went to church on Sunday mornings of light skies- violets painfully searing into my skin and flesh and I couldn’t breath; I didn’t need to breath yet. I'm still going down.

I used to compare living to pedestrian events. Now I don’t even try to make sense of anything anymore.
I caught my first glimpse of cerulean in the eyes of my older brother when our parents divorced, and I painted the same color in my new house that I lived in alone. Of course, I never finished painting it. I never finish anything; even the ideas so blue that threaten to strangle me with stipulation I cut off. It’s terrifying, more terrifying than drowning in deep oceans.

I’d never touched a woman, but I did love one once.
I was biting into a melody, shocking the nerves of my oversensitive front teeth. Long before I set away the violin, I played for a florist on the corner of my block. The only reason I noticed her was because she made a bouquet of hydrangeas and handed them to me in hopes that I would give them to a lover. It wasn’t uncommon that I remained in solace. Instead, I kept them until they rotted, and I still held on to them, and I am clutching them in my fists, not wanting to give them up to the sea.

I wanted to rip myself apart and consume my body and poke the eyes out of every living creature that ever looked at me. To become oroborous and leave nothing behind. My mother died never knowing my worth, but loving me nonetheless. I didn’t deserve her kindness, which was what unsettled me about parents. Unconditional love. The warm red colors. It was foreign so I refuted it, doing what man has done since the beginning of time.
You can see I had issues with relationships. Much the same as my writing, they would flow out of my grasp and I would ignore them, burning stares through the soles of my shoes avoiding human gazes. The dark navy of my fear for rejection liked to paint my body and present my naked self quivering distressingly in the cold in front of my peers. I was afraid of my own species. They were different shades and tints of a color I have now grown to despise, yet learned lives in the farthest reaches of my dreams, and hides under my bed threatening to smother me at night. I was the same hue, but it’s not as if I ever looked in a mirror.

I liked to kill the characters I created. It wasn’t out of wickedness, the reason was because they reminded me too much of myself. They ended up murky like the dirty periwinkle of the polluted city sky I lived under. Every bad quality I possessed was brought out and birthed into an innocent, fictional soul. It was the most harmless way to chastise myself, yet somehow split my personality on burnt paper.

And then I had a friend who saw the colors, too. I’ll never know if she was lying just to ease my anxiety, but she glowed turquoise, so I believed her.
Then she got married and sentiment turned her vision against me, and we dropped out of each other’s lives just as easily as we had bumped into one another in the produce section, ogling over the same piece of kohlrabi that seemed to radiate blue-violet. I tried to erase it from my memory.

Later then, I started seeing blue-green. It made me think of a flame, and made me wonder if fire was of wind or of itself. It was beautiful nonetheless, and I would smile cornflower smiles and sink in dark seas of failure and it was lovely, because I saw life in Prussian ink scrawling on parchment as naturally as breathing. For some reason I believed it would come as easy.

Deeper and deeper and I was now melting in the arms of a lover, multiple ones, never quite used to the constant touches or the dark blue fingerprints they’d leave over my body. I liked it when someone touched my skin, it was comforting and they were warm, and instead of a block of ice I was a small blue flame of a kindling fire.
The contact came and went, and I became serious about an unexciting career I had no care for, and I left promises of children and marriage in the lips of others. Being me, I left; every single one.
There was always a wave, one which I’ll describe as sea foam green, looking dainty on any beach but terrifying on the shore of my psyche. I left relationships because I was scared, and I slept in blizzards as punishment. I tried to find a way to avoid commitment and color, and escapism would seem easy in a snow storm, but the flurries were so white they turned an angelic heather, and I came to the conclusion that heaven is black and white.

It’s not surprising that I dreamt in blue, I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But in my subconscious it was different, I was floating and wrapped in baby blue, and it was powdery and there were choirs and I was deeply in love with the sound of my mother’s voice. I was no longer in the oceanic memories of what I wished had happened with my life or what I had recorded over reality; it was the unedited program of my life and times.

The older I became the more I spent thinking about living forever. By virtue of my lack of self-esteem, I wondered if my life was even worth the pacific centuries if I couldn’t even write about it. Dissatisfied, I waited to die.

I wake up at the bottom, palming sand that strains delicately through my fingers, and laced in complete darkness. I think of my mother first, and how she had loved me so much and died, and my brother, and my younger sister and her husband and my father and grandfather and people that cared for me, and there was suddenly not enough time or lives left to acknowledge those I’d admired.
When I open my eyes, I learn I am not surrounded by darkness at all, but I am in a sea of thousands of me, all floating to the bottom likewise. Some are farther up than others, and as I watch I recap the first time I drove my own car (a brilliant blue ’70 Malibu), and when I broke my leg while riding a bicycle without training wheels, and farther up now, I see when I learned how to walk. The bodies closer to me are more disappointing: me running away from a relationship, procrastinating on writing a novel, ignoring my mother’s phone calls. I try to yell, but of course, like a dream, it is swallowed in the aura of ignominiousness controlled by only me. I want to tell myself to let people in, and to visit my parents more, to keep a promise. I had let so many people down, and now here I am by myself, in a personal hell that is no longer a comforting hue but tastes of bitter, plaintive semen.

Walker had wanted to marry me.
The only promises I made were the ones I knew I would neglect.
I am dying and regretting everything.
My body begins to rid itself of the oxygen I had formerly believed was unnecessary, and yet somehow I regain myself and smile and say, “Oh, well”, in my head and aloud and I close my eyes and think maybe I can compose my rhapsody as a dead man.

I should’ve learned how to swim.